HA'ARETZ 04.12.00
Barak: Irving's loss is a triumph for free people
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=14&datee=04/12/00&id=7
5228
By Nitzan Horowitz and Yair Sheleg
Ha'aretz Correspondents and Agencies
Prime Minister Barak sent a special message from Washington to American
scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who was vindicated in a libel suit brought against
her in a London Court by controversial historian David Irving. Writing in the
"name of the Israeli people and the Jewish people," Barak declared that
Israel's strength today guarantees that "there can never be a second
Holocaust, and that nobody in the world can dare to rise up against the Jewish
people. But, in parallel, a persistent, determined battle is being fought
against people who try to deny the Holocaust, which brought about the
destruction of a third of our people."
Barak told Lipstadt that her struggle and victory is a triumph for free people
against "dark forces which want humanity's lowest point to be forgotten."
A member of Barak's cabinet, Social and Diaspora Affairs Minister Rabbi
Michael Melchior, invited Lipstadt to appear before the governmental forum for
combating anti-Semitism, which he chairs. Melchior declared that the court's
verdict "sent a message to the whole world" that the reality of the Holocaust
is not open for philosophical or historical debate, and that Holocaust deniers
should be ranked among "the worst Nazis." Speaking for Israel's government,
Melchior congratulated Lipstadt for the "strong moral stature" she showed
throughout the trial. The Emory University historian served as a "model of
Jewish determination," Melchior concluded.
Jewish Agency Chairman Salai Meridor stated that "it's regrettable and sad
that a court had to be involved in matter of this kind." He expressed hope
that "this will be the last time statements of this kind denying the Holocaust
will be articulated in normal society around the world."
March of the Living chairman MK Abraham Hirchson (Likud) added his hope that
"the verdict will put an emphatic end to abominable attempts to deny the
Holocaust." He said that he had invited Lipstadt to light memorial torches at
the Auschwitz concentration camp on Holocaust Day during the upcoming March of
the Living event.
Yad Vashem announced that "the primary meaning of the verdict is not that the
Holocaust occurred; the huge amount of documents and evidence held at Yad
Vashem, and archives and libraries around the world prove this, undoubtedly.
The verdict's meaning is to be found in the sharpening of borders between what
counts as logical, and illogical, discussion about the Holocaust. The ruling
has sent a message to the entire world, most significantly to young people,
that the arguments used by Irving and others to deny and diminish the events
of the Holocaust are not within the realm of acceptable or reasonable
discourse.". But the revisionists survive The Chilean government said
yesterday that it has banned about 100 foreigners from entering Chile after
learning they were planning to attend a gathering planned by pro-Nazi groups.
The government had previously prohibited the gathering.
"We have compiled a list of some 100 people, duly identified, who will be
stopped at airports or borders because they plan to attend the Nazi congress,"
deputy Interior Minister Jorge Burgos said.
Burgos would not give any names, but he said some of those on the list are
well-known pro-Nazi activists who have outstanding arrest warrants.
President Ricardo Lagos last month said his government would not allow the
gathering to take place in Chile.
The five-day meeting was scheduled to start April 21, according to its
organizer, Alexis Lopez, leader of the New Society Movement, a small pro-Nazi
group.
Burgos said the government believes organizers of the meeting have been mostly
looking for some media attention "rather than organizing something real big."
"But we are worried," he added, explaining the order to ban the foreigners.
He admitted some foreigners may still slip into the country and that a small
gathering may take place "at some private home, but they will not succeed in
holding a massive gathering.
JERUSALEM POST 04.12.00
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/04/12/News/News.5337.html
British court slams Irving as Holocaust denier
By Douglas Davis
LONDON (April 12) - The British High Court struck a blow for historical truth
yesterday when it awarded US Prof. Deborah Lipstadt an overwhelming victory
against UK Holocaust revisionist David Irving in a landmark libel trial.
In a devastating 334-page judgment that also found in favor of Lipstadt's
British publisher, Penguin Books, Justice Charles Grey exonerated Lipstadt,
professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, of all the main
libel charges stemming from her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing
Assault on Truth and Memory.
Exactly three months after the start of the trial, the judge labelled Irving a
"pro-Nazi polemicist" and found that he:
* deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence to suit his
own ideological agenda;
* unjustifiably portrayed Hitler in a favorable light, particularly in his
attitude toward, and treatment of, Jews;
* associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism;
* is an antisemite, a racist, and a Holocaust denier.
In addition to legal defeat and public humiliation, Irving, who lives in a
$1.5 million apartment in London's Mayfair district, now faces a bill for
legal costs of at least $5m. and bankruptcy.
Referring to Irving's political activities, the judge said "the content of his
speeches and interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish
bias. He makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi
regime, which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities they
inflicted on the Jews. The picture of Irving that emerges... reveal him to be
a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist."
Grey said he found that "for the most part, the falsification of the
historical record was deliberate... Irving was motivated by a desire to
present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs, even
if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence."
He also ruled that Lipstadt had failed to prove that Irving had a
self-portrait of Hitler above his desk; that he was a scheduled speaker at an
anti-Zionist conference in Sweden which was to have been attended by neo-Nazi,
Hamas, and Hizbullah representatives, and that he had exposed parts of the
original Goebbels diary to potential damage.
However, he found that the charges which had been proved were of "sufficient
gravity" that the unproved charges did not have "any material effect on
Irving's reputation."
After the judgment, Lipstadt said she was filled with "intense joy and deep
gratitude that I had people around me who helped me get through this ordeal."
But she expressed sorrow for Holocaust survivors who had attended the trial
and had witnessed Irving's taunts.
She came close to tears when she recalled being "enveloped by survivors" who
had approached her during the trial to thank her for her stand against Irving.
"But the nightmare is not over," she warned.
"There is no end to the battle against racism, antisemitism, and fascism."
The trial, she said, had been "a long and difficult process" and she hoped
that "this victory will save other authors from having to face such trials and
tribulations. I see this not only as a personal victory but also as a victory
for all those who speak out against hate and prejudice."
Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that "Israel's strength today ensures that a
second Holocaust will not take place and no one in the world will dare rise up
against the Jewish people. At the same time Israel conducts a determined and
brazen struggle against those who try to deny the Holocaust."
The statement said that Barak spoke to Lipstadt and told her that her victory
is a "victory of the free world against the dark forces seeking to obliterate
the memory of the lowest point humanity ever reached."
Ambassador to the UK Dror Zeigerman, who attended yesterday's two-hour reading
of the judgment summary, told The Jerusalem Post that the trial represented
another chapter in the fight against the twin evils of racism and
antisemitism.
"As I sat in court, I was again powerfully reminded why we need a State of
Israel that is strong and democratic," he said.
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, which
provided archive material for Lipstadt's defense, said the verdict would help
in the fight against neo-Nazism.
"It has sent a message to the entire world, most significantly to young
people, that the arguments used by Irving and others to deny and diminish the
events of the Holocaust are not within the realm of acceptable or reasonable
discourse," Yad Vashem said in a statement. "The issue is not of Irving's
right to say or not to say ridiculous things, but that people understand that
the ideas of Irving and his ilk are based on a political neo-Nazi ideology,
and do not represent any form of historical truth."
British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks hailed the judgment as "a victory for
truth. Viewed against a European backdrop where parties espousing neo-Nazi
views have been able to achieve electoral success, the message behind this
verdict is highly significant - that those people who distort history must not
be allowed to create an environment in which it is repeated."
The Anti-Defamation League said the ruling vindicates Lipstadt's scholarship
while reaffirming Irving's status as a "falsifier of history and a Nazi
sympathizer."
However, ADL director Abraham Foxman said "it is unfortunate that David Irving
was able even to bring such frivolous charges into a courtroom. At least the
trial provided an opportunity to reveal once again the reality of the
Holocaust and the dangers of those who seek to deny it or trivialize it."
However, Israeli author Tom Segev said he expects the verdict to have little
impact. Holocaust awareness is strong around the world and those trying to
deny or diminish the scope of the genocide are usually found on the margins,
said Segev.
"The Holocaust is considered a code for the ultimate evil in cultures that
have never even heard of a Jew," said Segev, who has written a book on the
impact of the Holocaust on Israeli society.
(Marilyn Henry, Janine Zacharia, and news agencies contributed to this
report.)
==
Comment
Unfortunately, Holocaust denial will not end here
Anne McElvoy
04/12/2000
The Independent - London
FOREIGN
DAVID IRVING has secured a lasting claim to fame as the least convincing
libel litigant to appear in the British courts since Neil Hamilton. A
momentous self-delusion inspired him to take the stand against Deborah
Lipstadt's claim that he was a Holocaust denier when he has spent the last
20 years advancing by all possible and impossible arguments the thesis that
the mass extermination of the Jews in the Third Reich did not take place.
This case was a crash course in perversity, underwritten by racial hatred.
Mr Irving shared with us his belief that annihilation of the Jews by gas in
Auschwitz could not have been possible because there were "no holes in the
roof" to pump gas through, that the cyanide residues found in the hair of
victims was due to a delousing programme, and that Hitler had not known of
the killings until 1943.
Strip away from Mr Irving's account the number of well-documented things
which he alleges did not happen under Hitler, and the Germany of the Third
Reich emerges as a benign, if accident-prone, place where things just
happened to get out of hand because of the stroppiness of the Jews and some
forgivable Aryan over-reaction.
A number of observers in the courtroom were reminded of the self- definition
of Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust Part 1: "I am the spirit that denies
everything." Goethe then adds a twist to his Manichaean verbal game which is
far more relevant to the Irving case. The Lord God intervenes in the
dialogue to reassure us that the devil is not (so to speak) all bad: "He
wills only the ill but ends up doing good."
This court case has done us a power of good. It is worth a hundred Holocaust
Memorial days because it provided a live example of the real nature of
Holocaust denial and its inseparability from vile and active anti-Semitism.
Mr Irving's zeal in unmasking what he believes to be a grand conspiracy
distorting the scale of Nazi evil, his obsessive quest for mitigating
evidence to "prove" that Auschwitz was merely a detention camp and not the
dark heart of a killing machine, alerts us anew to the danger of treating
the Holocaust as something to be filed away neatly, as understood, dealt
with, catalogued and commemorated.
The scale of the atrocities and the complicity of the German military, civil
service, police and legal institutions remain awesome, incomprehensible.
Their causes, and the distribution of responsibility, will always be the
subject of dispute. The day we believe that there is nothing left to argue
about is the day we have really learnt to forget.
British libel law gets a rough press at the moment. In this case, however,
it has served the admirable and civilised purpose of stripping bare the
layers of false mystery which have long sheltered behind the description of
the historian as "maverick". What we heard in the High Court was the
testimony of an overt anti-Semite who sang racist ditties to his daughter.
Mr Irving is a recognisable type in public discourse: the vain
controversialist who believes that he has revealed a profound truth simply
by saying something outrageous enough, sufficiently often to produce a
hostile response. He then proceeds to describe the rejection of his views as
an "organised international conspiracy". And we all know which racial group
is behind organised international conspiracies, don't we? They are the same
people, he once explained, "who shout `Ours! Ours! Ours!' when a hoard of
gold turns up" and get upset when the "inevitable pogroms" occur.
The respected conservative historian Andrew Roberts, perplexed by the
mixture of Mr Irving's diligence as a researcher and unearther of fresh
sources and his warped belief that Auschwitz was a "racket... baloney", once
asked him how he accounted for the fact that a lot of people who had been
alive in 1939 in Europe were missing by 1945. Mr Irving replied that they
had succumbed to "typhus, suicide, natural wastage, ad hoc killings and
local pogroms".
The most intriguing question raised by the evidence was the judge's claim
that Mr Irving's increasing political activism disqualified him from his
claim to be a serious "objective" historian. This is marshy ground on which
to pitch an argument and a sign that legal minds do not always grasp the
pitfalls of referring matters to the deceptive higher court of objectivity.
A lot of very good historians imbued their work with bias. AJP Taylor, the
post-war Establishment's favoured interpreter of the Third Reich, shaped his
presentation of German history as a continuous arc, from the militarism of
Bismarck to the death camps, to fit his own anti-German views. Russia's
Dimitri Volkogonov became the favourite historian of the glasnost era by
"reinterpreting" Stalin and Lenin. This task, it soon emerged, was carried
out with the support of the intelligence services, who could see the way the
wind was blowing and the need to show a willingness to revise history in
order to survive the present. Yet no one could deny Volkogonov's
contribution to scholarship.
With no future as a widely published historian and an insatiable appetite
for self-publicity, Mr Irving will very probably devote himself to role of
cause celebre among those who believe that no atrocity is well-documented
enough to be beyond question.
The notion of alternative truth, suppressed by established interests,
remains a seductive one, even among those who have no sympathy for the
anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler fantasies of Mr Irving. The wider the liberal
consensus, the more enticing becomes the prospect of opposing it.
This instinct of exaggerated and debilitating scepticism was roundly -
although ultimately unsuccessfully - exploited by LM magazine to defend
ITN's libel suit over the magazine's claims that it had falsified pictures
inside a Bosnian camp. The magazine was a lively read with a genuinely
challenging, entertaining and anti- consensual point of view. Alas, it also
developed a nasty little stock in trade of callow journalistic questioning
of the truth about human rights abuses. In this world of boundless
relativities, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb psychopath, became "War
Criminal or Whipping Boy?", mass graves look a lot like allotments when seen
from the air, and no one could ever be quite sure who is to blame for the
massacres.
Mr Irving is the crudest, most pernicious face of that tendency. He put
himself so far beyond the limits of acceptability by his increasingly
eccentric, inflammatory statements on the "responsibility" of the Jews for
their extermination that there was no longer much need for Ms Lipstadt's
claim to prove that he had set out to whitewash the Third Reich.
As a Holocaust denier, Mr Irving turned out to be less of a class act than
his salon admirers had hoped. We should not fool ourselves that this victory
is final. One day, a more calculating mouthpiece for similar views will
emerge to put the revisionist case in a less foolhardy way, and the whole
business will begin all over again. The big lies are never short of
proponents. The big truths have to be defended again and again.
Leading article: David Irving lost his case - and we can celebrate a victory
for free speech
04/12/2000
The Independent - London
ALTHOUGH IT must have been obvious to every interested party other than
David Irving himself - and his band of devoted supporters - that he would
lose his libel lawsuit against historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher
Penguin Books, it is still a relief to be able to report that free speech
has had a rare triumph in the British libel courts. For consider what would
have happened if Mr Irving had been vindicated in his contention that the
systematic destruction of European Jewry in the Nazi death camps never
occurred, that the first- hand testimony to the use of gas chambers at
Auschwitz was a tissue of lies, and that the meticulous accounts of
historians who had devoted their careers to documenting the facts had been
slipshod and unreliable.
Mr Irving is not a cloistered academic disinterestedly pursuing
uncomfortable revelations to their ineluctable, if uncomfortable,
conclusion. He has made a point of addressing extreme right-wing rallies in
Germany and elsewhere. His craftily measured insinuations have been used as
"evidence" by Holocaust deniers and other anti- Semitic groupings to pursue
their own deplorable racist agendas. If Mr Irving had convinced a British
court that he was a reputable historian whose work did not "deny" the
Holocaust, but merely adjusted the death figures downwards and ascribed the
means of death to poor conditions in the Nazi labour camps, this would have
been trumpeted as a victory for Holocaust denial tout court.
It does seem absurd, on the face of it, that any event so well- attested as
the German attempt to put into effect Hitler's "final solution" should be a
subject of controversy. A visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in
Jerusalem; the reading of powerful personal testimony such as, to take just
one example, that of Primo Levi, the Italian chemist who wrote about his
experiences at Auschwitz; even the viewing of the popular film Schindler's
List; all provide a graphic and convincing account for anyone who has eyes
to see and ears to hear. This is backed up by more scholarship than has been
applied to practically any other of the great crimes of the 20th century. At
this point, denial of the fact of the Holocaust, and the broad outlines of
the narrative, is more a matter for abnormal psychology than modern history.
The judge's condemnation of the "historian" is along these lines, and is
devastating. David Irving, he concludes on the most persuasive grounds, has
"for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence". Those reasons include
his being "an active Holocaust denier", who is "anti-Semitic and racist".
What one can say in praise of the arguing out of this pathetic dispute in
the High Court is that the great liberal principle, enunciated by John
Stuart Mill, of the marketplace of ideas in which false coin is tested and
replaced by true, has been vindicated both by the cogency of the testimony
presented by the defence, and by the verdict. The crowning irony is that
David Irving tried to use the notoriously restrictive British libel law to
choke off critical examination of his own views in the name of his right to
criticise the work of others. The Court, in the person of Mr Justice Gray,
thankfully, saw through that typically discreditable manoeuvre.
Racist. Anti-Semite. Holocaust denier. How history will judge David Irving
Ian Burrell Home Affairs Correspondent
04/12/2000
The Independent - London
THE REVISIONIST historian David Irving is facing ruin after a judge
denounced him yesterday as an "anti-Semitic and racist" Holocaust denier and
a "pro-Nazi polemicist".
Mr Justice Gray ruled at the end of a High Court libel trial in London that
Mr Irving had "persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated
historical evidence" to portray Hitler in "an unwarrantedly favourable light".
The crushing and humiliating defeat for a historian who has claimed that the
systematic murder of Jews in Nazi concentration camps never took place was
last night hailed by Jewish groups as an "epic victory for truth and justice".
Lord Janner of Braunstone QC, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust,
said: "The Irving case shows the crucial importance of educating our young
people in the tragedy of the Holocaust especially as a symbol of the dangers
of allowing racist dictatorships to rule."
Mr Irving was facing a bill for defence costs of pounds 2m after the judge,
Mr Justice Gray, ruled that the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and the
publishers Penguin Books had been justified in describing Mr Irving as a
Holocaust denier.
Mr Irving, 62, claimed that Professor Lipstadt's book, Denying the
Holocaust: the growing assault on truth and memory, had destroyed his
livelihood and generated "waves of hatred" against him.
But after hearing 32 days of evidence, Mr Justice Gray found the charges
against Mr Irving "substantially true". He said: "Irving was motivated by a
desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological
beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical
evidence."
He attacked Mr Irving for his "pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias", saying: "He
makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime which
tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities which they
inflicted on the Jews. He is content to mix with neo-fascists and appears to
share many of their racist and anti- Semitic prejudices."
Mr Irving, who represented himself in the action, had said he never claimed
that the Holocaust did not occur but questioned whether the killings were
systematic or sanctioned by Hitler. He claimed that any distortions were
genuine errors.
But the judge, who pointed out that Mr Irving's position changed during the
trial, had examined nearly 20 alleged distortions and found that he had
consistently twisted the facts to present a pro- Nazi view.
Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War, was found to have misrepresented
Hitler's role in the Munich putsch of 1923, deliberately underplayed his
part in the Kristallnacht pogrom against the Jews in 1938 and wrongly
portrayed him as a "friend" of the Jews until 1943.
Mr Justice Gray was dismissive of evidence used by Mr Irving to support his
conjecture that systematic gassing did not take place at Auschwitz. "No
objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that
there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a
substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews," the judge said.
His belief that Mr Irving's errors were not the result of genuine mistakes
was underscored by a view that the plaintiff was a talented military
historian: "His mastery of the detail of the historical documents is
remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent," he said.
Mr Justice Gray cited a series of examples as "clear evidence" of Mr
Irving's anti-Semitism: "Irving has made claims that Jews deserve to be
disliked; that they brought the Holocaust on themselves; that Jewish
financiers are crooked; that Jews generate anti-Semitism by their greed and
mendacity". He also said Mr Irving happily associated with neo-Nazis. "His
association with such individuals indicates in my judgement that Irving
shares many of their political beliefs," he said.
Yesterday, Ms Lipstadt, 53, a professor in modern Jewish and Holocaust
studies at Emory University in Georgia, United States, said she was
delighted by the judgment and felt "exceptionally vindicated". Accusing Mr
Irving of "dancing on the graves" of Holocaust victims, she said: "I had
argued that David Irving was partisan and an apologist for the Nazis and
anti- Semitic. The judge went further than I did in his ruling - and called
him a racist."
Mr Irving, who was hit by an egg as he arrived at the court yesterday,
described the ruling as "firstly, indescribable and secondly, perverse" and
said he was considering an appeal.
In The Judge's Words
Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence... he has portrayed
Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light... he is an active Holocaust
denier... he is anti-Semitic and racist and... he associates with right-wing
extremists who promote neo-Nazism... The contents of his speeches and
interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias. He
makes... unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime which tend to exonerate
the Nazis for the appalling atrocities they inflicted upon the Jews... He is
content to mix with neo-fascists and appears to share many of their racist
and anti- Semitic prejudices. The picture of Irving which emerges reveals
him to be a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist
From Mr Justice Gray's judgment in the High Court yesterday
The Irving judgement: `A victory for all who speak out against prejudice'
The Vindicated
Andrew Buncombe
04/12/2000
The Independent - London
DEBORAH LIPSTADT said yesterday that she considered her libel victory not
just a personal win but "a victory for all those who speak out against hate
and prejudice".
In a statement issued after her successful defence, Professor Lipstadt, 51,
said she hoped other authors would be saved such "trials and tribulations".
"Let us remember that this trial was not about whether the Holocaust
happened but whether I was correct in describing David Irving as a denier of
the Holocaust, a Hitler partisan, an anti-Semite and a right-wing
extremist," she said. "The judge has found that I was correct in all these
points."
Professor Lipstadt, who occupies the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and
Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, United States, made the
accusations in her book Denying the Holocaust, published in Britain in 1995.
She said the idea for the book started in the late Eighties, when she became
aware of the number of Holocaust deniers who were being offered respectable
platforms. She said she was happy to discuss certain aspects of the
Holocaust, such as whether the Final Solution was Hitler's alone, but she
refused to discuss whether the Holocaust took place. "That would be
equivalent to debating whether the Roman Empire existed," she once said.
Born in New York to a German Jewish father and a Canadian mother, Professor
Lipstadt describes herself as a traditionalist, but not an Orthodox Jew. She
sits on the executive committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington and chairs its educational committee.
Yesterday she said she was grateful to her publishers, Penguin, for backing
her case, adding: "I am very pleased that what I wrote has been vindicated.
I never had any doubts that it would be, but none the less I am grateful."
In a statement, Penguin said it fought to "defend our right as a publisher
and to defend the right of our author to publish her serious and highly
regarded book on the subject of Holocaust denial". It added: "We believed it
was our duty to defend the claim which the evidence showed - and which the
judge has now ruled - had no merit."
The Irving judgement: Judge dismantles author's distorted view of history
The Findings
Andrew Buncombe
04/12/2000
The Independent - London
BY THE time that David Irving slipped into Court 36 at the Royal Courts of
Justice yesterday morning he knew the game was up.
Because he was representing himself, he had been given Mr Justice Gray's
written judgement the day before. He would have had ample chance to study
it, ample opportunity to see how he had failed to have his view of history
accepted.
But though he was aware of the decision, Mr Irving could not have fully
expected what was coming.
Over the next hour and 50 minutes, Mr Justice Gray did not so much dismiss
the historian's claim - that he had been libelled by Professor Deborah
Lipstadt - as dismantle it, destroy it, turn it on its head and then throw
it back into Mr Irving's heavy-joweled face. In doing so, he also
fundamentally questioned his right to be called a historian.
The judge started by saying it was not his job to decide what had happened
under the Nazis: he was a trial judge and not an historian. But, as he
hurried through his main findings, that was exactly the role he assumed. He
started with the allegation contained within Professor Lipstadt's book,
Denying the Holocaust, that Mr Irving had misrepresented the historical
evidence.
No one doubted, said the judge, that as a military historian Mr Irving had
much to commend him. He had undertaken painstaking research.
But then the turned to specific matters: Hitler's 1924 trial, Kristallnacht,
the shooting of the Jews in Riga, the timing of the so- called final
solution. Names and places from another world, known to most only from
history books, echoed around the courtroom.
"It is my conclusion," said Mr Justice Gray, "that, judged objectively,
Irving treated the historical evidence in a matter which fell far short of
the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian. Irving ...
misrepresented and distorted the evidence."
Mr Irving's face turned the colour of his burgundy waistcoat as he listened.
(He had removed his jacket after being pelted with an egg as he entered.)
But the judge barely paused, as he turned to Mr Irving's argument over the
absence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and the extent of the Holocaust. "No
objective fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there
were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial
scale to kill hundreds and thousands of Jews," said the judge.
Though the packed courtroom remained silent, one sensed that many in the
public gallery were inwardly cheering.
There was no respite for Mr Irving. He was a Holocaust denier; he may not be
a racist in the usual sense, said the judge, but he mixed with racists and
shared many of their right-wing views.
And with a showman's timing Mr Justice Gray saved the best for the end - the
matter of whether Mr Irving had deliberately got things wrong. "For the most
part the falsification of the ... record was deliberate and that Irving was
motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own
ideological evidence."
The Irving judgement: State built on suffering breathes a collective sigh of
satisfaction Reaction
Phil Reeves in Jerusalem
04/12/2000
The Independent - London
ISRAEL FOLLOWED the David Irving libel trial as closely as Britain, and
reacted with satisfaction and relief yesterday.
Almost no subject is as sensitive in the Jewish state - whose creation owes
much to the appalling events that Mr Irving has questioned - as the efforts
by the far right to deny that the Holocaust happened. Throughout the trial,
the Israeli media carried regular reports on the case, including the
occasional ranting and eccentric interview with the man himself. Israelis
were awaiting the outcome with intense interest, seeing it as a measure of
the advances - or otherwise - made by those seeking to rewrite their history.
In a country whose elders know only too painfully that Auschwitz was not, as
Mr Irving has contended, little more than a "Disneyland for tourists" built
after the war, the issue has long been a source of deep concern. It was
revived anew by Jewish anger over the proliferation of neo-Nazi claptrap on
the internet. Mr Irving pushed it to the top of the headlines - and, in
doing so, did a favour to the cause of those who want to ensure that the
Nazi terror is never forgotten.
A measure of Israel's interest came in February when the state archives
released the 40-year-old prison memoirs of Adolf Eichmann, chief transport
officer for the Nazi death machine, so that they could be used by the
defendant, Professor Deborah Lipstadt.
The fact that yesterday's verdict was no surprise did not dampen the Israeli
response. "I am very pleased," said Dr Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi-hunter with the
Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem. "But, given the anti-Semitic and
racist statements made by Irving during the trial, I would have been very
surprised if the result had been different. It would have been a disaster if
he had won because it would have increased the willingness of other people
to listen to this drivel. The verdict won't stop the deniers, as they are
inveterate anti-Semites, but I think it will lessen the willingness of
others to listen to them."
Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial - which has 55 million pages of
documents detailing the Holocaust and was built on the ashes of Jews slain
by the Nazis - described the verdict as "gratifying" and of "great
significance to those involved in the fight against neo- Nazism and
neo-fascism, and who strive to teach the true events of history".
Leading Article: The bad history man
04/12/2000
The Daily Telegraph
THE DOWNFALL of David Irving does not mean the triumph of censorship. Nobody
forced him to sue Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin, for libel.
His failure to persuade the court that he had been defamed by her book
Denying the Holocaust has no implications for free speech.
It is not the facts of the Holocaust that have been on trial at the High
Court for the past few months, but Mr Irving's reputation as a historian. Mr
Justice Gray said yesterday that "it is no part of my function to make
findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi regime". His 300-page
judgment was remarkable for its severity, going beyond Professor Lipstadt's
allegation of Holocaust denial and manipulation of evidence to find that Mr
Irving was also an anti-Semite, a racist and a neo-Nazi sympathiser. But the
judge offered no support to those who desire the suppression of historical
debate by legal proscription. However offensive the views of Mr Irving
undoubtedly are, he and others will continue to enjoy the freedom to express
them in this country.
Many people, it is true, have been profoundly disturbed by this case. The
court at times threatened to become a theatre of the absurd, in which
Auschwitz survivors were cross-examined by a man who clearly considered
their traumatic experiences to be concocted. In and out of court, Mr Irving
has received unprecedented publicity for his distortions and fantasies;
yesterday, for instance, he was given several minutes of prime time on the
BBC's Today programme. In Germany, where Holocaust denial is a criminal
offence, a person of Mr Irving's opinions would never gain access to the
media. That is some measure of the relative levels of anxiety in the two
countries about their recent history. It is scarcely surprising to find such
anxiety among the Germans, a nation that has subjected an entire continent
to the wholesale falsification of history within living memory, and has
spent the past half-century undoing the damage. The British, by contrast,
are proud of their past and are notoriously tolerant of eccentrics - even
those whose motivation is suspect. Mr Irving's anti-Semitism has not
prevented his books being judged on their merits. Such tolerance is the mark
of a self-confident society.
The courts may have a didactic as well as a judicial function. The Irving
case has done for the new century what the Nuremberg tribunals or the
Eichmann trial did for earlier generations. The civil law acquitted itself
well; a state prosecution under a statutory offence of Holocaust denial
would have sent out illiberal signals. As it is, Mr Irving cannot blame the
authorities for the catastrophe that has befallen his reputation and his
fortunes. The judge paid tribute to his scholarship as a military historian:
"He is beyond question able and intelligent." Those qualities render his
betrayal of his vocation all the more heinous. Like Milton's Satan,
"vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair", Mr Irving has damned himself.
Comment: The trial of David Irving - and my part in his downfall: John
Keegan, Defence Editor, argues in the wake of yesterday's verdict that there
are two Irvings - the meticulous researcher and the flawed thinker
John Keegan
04/12/2000
The Daily Telegraph
THE news that David Irving has lost his libel case will send a tremor
through the community of 20th-century historians. For more than a year now,
the gossip between them has been about whether he would lose or not, a
subject on which all hedged bets. "It depends whether the judge goes for
Holocaust denial or slurs on his reputation", was the general view. "If the
first he'll lose, if the second he might get away with it." What this
insider talk meant was that Mr Irving might well persuade the judge of the
unfairness of Professor Lipstadt's accusations of his bad historical method.
That was what he cared about and he would no doubt argue his case well. If,
however, her accusation that Irving's version of the Holocaust was so
untruthful as to outweigh his merits as an otherwise objective historian,
then he would get no damages and have to pay enormous costs.
As the trial date drew nearer, talk turned to the question of who had been
asked to give evidence. Eventually I was. I - like others I knew - declined.
Earlier experiences had persuaded me that nothing but trouble comes of
taking sides over Irving. Decide against him, and his associates accuse one
of prejudice. On this occasion I was accused of cowardice. Decide for him,
and the smears start. I have written complimentary reviews of Irving's work
as a military historian to find myself posted on the internet as a Nazi
sympathiser.
Refusal did not get me off the hook. Last autumn, Mr Irving told me he
intended to subpoena me and in January the summons appeared. To it was
attached a cheque for pounds 50, thus making it an enforceable court
instrument. I had to appear, like it or not.
In practice, the appearance was painless. Mr Irving very decently gave me
the chance at the outset to state that I was not present willingly. He
allowed me to explain why, without interruption. There was no jury to
unsettle one, the parties having agreed to leave it all to the judge, a
distinguished former libel QC, Charles Gray (who represented Lord Aldington
in the famous Tolstoy case). The judge was relaxed but a master of the
material. All I had to do was answer Mr Irving's questions. They were about
my opinion of him as a historian. He had quotations from favourable reviews
of his work I had written. Could such opinions, he asked, in effect, be
consistent with the contrary opinions of other historians?
In a sense this was the central question, which would recur throughout the
hearing. Prof Lipstadt's case was that the bad in Irving was so bad that it
robbed all he wrote of value. Irving's case was that, if some historians of
reputation praised parts of his work, the praise extended to all his work.
Both positions are, of course, highly artificial. Fortunately, I did not
have to give my opinion of Prof Lipstadt's work. It was easy, however, to
say that a reviewer is at liberty to pick and choose. I had praised, and
would praise again, I said, Irving's extraordinary ability to describe and
analyse Hitler's conduct of military operations, which was his main
occupation during the Second World War. That did not imply endorsement of
Irving's view that Hitler did not "know" about the Holocaust until October
1943. That view was "perverse", I said. What did I mean? I meant, I said,
that it defied reason, or common sense. Would it not, however, be the most
extraordinary historical revelation of the war, Irving asked, if it could be
shown that he did not know about the Holocaust? This was a very curious
moment. I suddenly recognised that Irving believed that Hitler's ignorance
could be demonstrated.
I stepped down but stayed to watch the rest of the morning's proceedings. Mr
Irving's performance was very impressive. He is a large, strong, handsome
man, excellently dressed, with the appearance of a leading QC. He performs
as well as a QC also, asking, in a firm but courteous voice, precise
questions which demonstrate his detailed knowledge of an enormous body of
material. There it was all around us, hundreds of box files holding
thousands of pages telling in millions of words what had been done and
suffered in Hitler's Europe. Irving knows the material paragraph by
paragraph. His skill as an archivist cannot be contested.
Unfortunately for him, the judge has now decided that all-consuming
knowledge of a vast body of material does not excuse faults in interpreting
it. Irving, the judge said, "repeatedly makes assertions about the Holocaust
which are unsupported by or contrary to the historical record". This is the
part of the judgment that will hurt. Mr Irving, perhaps because he left
London University without taking a degree, is acutely concerned to be
recognised as an academic historian among others. It is not enough for him
to receive compliments from professors about his skill in uncovering lost
documents or finding forgotten survivors of Hitler's court. Those are the
sort of things journalists do. He wants to be praised for his source notes,
for his exegesis, for his bibliographies, for what historians call "the
apparatus". As a result, his books positively clank and groan under the
weight of apparatus. Very good it is too. Irving, never confident enough to
believe what he reads about himself, really is admired by some of those
whose approval he seeks.
Unfortunately for him, he is admired only when he writes sense. When he
writes nonsense, a small but disabling element in his work, he sacrifices
all admiration and incurs blame mixed with incredulity. How can anyone so
good at history be so bad?
There is an answer. It is that there are really two Irvings. There is Irving
the researcher and most of Irving the writer, who sticks to the facts and
makes eloquent sense of them. Then there is Irving the thinker, who lets
insecurities, imagined slights and youthful resentments bubble up from
within him to cloud his mind. It is as if he becomes possessed by the desire
to shock and confound the respectable ranks of academe, to write the
unprintable and to speak the unutterable. Like many who seek to shock, he
may not really believe what he says and probably feels astounded when taken
seriously.
He has, in short, many of the qualities of the most creative historians. He
is certainly never dull. Prof Lipstadt, by contrast, seems as dull as only
the self-righteously politically correct can be. Few other historians had
ever heard of her before this case. Most will not want to hear from her
again. Mr Irving, if he will only learn from this case, still has much that
is interesting to tell us.
Irving libel trial: The loser : Advice from Hitler sends ally on road to
defeat
Neil Tweedie
04/12/2000
The Daily Telegraph
IF David Irving loses everything as a result of his defeat in his libel
action against Deborah Lipstadt he will have no one but himself to blame -
except, that is, the Fuhrer.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph before yesterday's verdict, the
author was asked how he would meet the enormous legal costs now being sought
by her and Penguin Books.
"It will be a total wipe-out," he said. "Being totally confident in victory,
I have not done what Aitken did. I have not put property in any other
people's names."
He said that, in making his decision, he had followed Hitler's advice.
"If people say why have I not done so I would say this is a lesson of World
War II, of Adolf Hitler. He criticised his generals for wanting to be in
rear defensive positions - in an East Wall.
"He said as soon as you build an East Wall you are going to fall back on it
in double-quick time. If they had no East Wall to fall back on, then they'd
fight harder. So the knowledge that I have no fall-back position makes me
fight that much harder. Of course, Hitler lost."
History does indeed have a way of repeating itself. Mr Irving is now
confronted with the loss of his main asset, his first-floor flat in Mayfair.
Prof Lipstadt's and Penguin's lawyers believe it to be heavily mortgaged. Mr
Irving shares it with Bente Hogh, a 36-year-old Danish blue-eyed blonde.
They have a daughter, Jessica, six. The couple met after Miss Hogh and a
friend rented the flat while Mr Irving was away.
Mr Irving married in 1961 and had four daughters by his Spanish wife. They
divorced in 1981. One daughter died last year at 18.
Miss Hogh is counting cheques sent by wellwishers. Mr Irving claims total
donations to his "fighting fund" of $500,000 (about pounds 340,000).
"There are 5,400 people around the world who give me loads of money," he
said. "They're in America, Australia. It all goes into the battle. It goes
from about $2, where it's hardly worth the postage -they always get a
personal letter of thanks from me - up to $50 or $60 or $70 or $80,000."
So who thought him worth $80,000? "A wellwisher with no political bent."
Mr Irving had denied in court being academic. Was that true? One should have
known better than to expect a yes or no.
He replied: "If I was a member of a Jewish family in Riga in 1941 being
dragged towards pits on the edge of a forest, I would want to know why. And
then I would look around and I would not necessarily say well, it's because
the Nazis or the Lithuanian and Latvian collaborators are gangsters
determined to kill us all.
"I would possibly - and I should possibly - say well, it may be the way a
number of my co-religionists joined the NKVD during the year when the
Russians were here in power and carried out bestial murders of the
non-Jewish population.
"This may be possibly why I, an innocent Jew, am now finding myself being
dragged with my wife and children towards the edge of that pit."
Presumably, there were Gentiles in the NKVD?
"Very few. The leadership was almost entirely Jewish. And this is one of the
little facts of history you won't find very widely reported."
Why Mr Irving turned out like this is hard to know. His upbringing was
relatively conventional. He was born in 1938. His father, who served in the
Royal Navy during the war, left home when he was a boy. His mother had to
raise him, his twin brother and older brother with little money.
He attended public school in Brentwood, Essex, before going to Imperial
College, London. He failed to finish his degree, opting instead to work as a
steelworker in the Ruhr. The still obvious bomb damage inspired his first
book on the destruction by the Allies of Dresden, published in 1963. Mr
Irving tried to claim it as a war crime equivalent to those committed by the
Nazis.
Both his brothers were in the RAF and were called to the Air Ministry for a
"wigging" about his attack on Bomber Command.
What motivated his desire to prove the non-existence of the Holocaust?
"I am totally uninterested in the Holocaust. I'm totally uninterested in the
survival of the story of the Holocaust or the survival or cohesion of the
Jewish people or the Israeli government, or the big corporations who depend
on it. My great consuming interest at the moment is my six-year-old daughter."
Does he regret composing the verse Prof Lipstadt's defence team uncovered in
his diaries?
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or sectarian
I have no plans to marry
An Ape or Rastafarian
He said he regretted using Rastafarian and should have used vegetarian.
What would you say to those who say you are polluting your daughter's mind?
"Right. Out you go!" With that he is gone. Bente makes a softly-spoken
apology and the interview is over.
Irving libel trial: The historian who strode into court with a reputation
but left facing ruin
Neil Tweedie
04/12/2000
The Daily Telegraph
THERE was at least one ally waiting for David Irving as he emerged from the
High Court in London yesterday with his personal and professional reputation
in tatters.
An elderly man wearing a sandwich board shouted to anyone who cared to
listen that Mr Irving was a "bringer of truth". His was a lone voice.
Few plaintiffs in a libel action have had their characters so
comprehensively demolished as Mr Irving. He must rue the day that he decided
to sue Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.
Mr Justice Gray branded him a racist and anti-Semite, an associate of
Right-wing extremists who promoted neo-Nazism. He was a Holocaust denier,
who had persistently manipulated and misrepresented the historical record
for ideological purposes.
He had rubbished the existence of the gas chambers and twisted events to
portray Hitler in a favourable light.
Mr Irving faces the loss of his home in Mayfair and the threat of enforced
bankruptcy. He was warned yesterday that he would be liable for the bulk of
the costs, estimated at pounds 2.3 million.
His chances of securing a contract from a British publisher in the future
must be remote. How did he so successfully sabotage his own career?
The journey to Irving v Penguin and Lipstadt began with the publication in
1977 of his most famous work, Hitler's War. Mr Irving claimed that the
Fuhrer had not been aware of the mass extermination of European Jewry until
1943.
There was the inevitable outcry. Mr Irving refused to repent, simply
offering a reward to anyone who could find a document directly linking
Hitler to the Final Solution.
At that stage his stock among historians was relatively high. His journeys
into the archives of the Third Reich had shed new light on its workings.
Mr Irving liked to see himself as a hands-on historian, a maverick taunting
the historical establishment with unorthodox views based on primary sources.
But over time his views and associations assumed an increasingly disturbing
character.
Mr Irving was feted by neo-Nazis in Austria and Germany, his revisionist
writings and speeches earning him star status. He had become one of the main
speakers for the Deutsche Volksunion (DVU), a far-Right party preaching
racial hatred.
By 1988, Mr Irving was a confirmed Holocaust denier.
In the second edition of Hitler's War, published in 1991, all mention of the
Holocaust was expunged. Auschwitz the death camp was now Auschwitz the slave
labour camp. The gas chambers were a myth, the result of British, Soviet and
Jewish disinformation.
He told an audience in Canada: "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about
Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a
brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die - as large
numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war - why believe the rest
of the baloney?
"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of
Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in
Auschwitz.
"Oh, you think that's tasteless? How about this: there are so many Auschwitz
survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past,
which is biologically very odd to say the least. Because I'm going to form
an Association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other
Liars, or the A-S-S-H-O-L-S."
The Jews who died in the war had perished in the same way as other groups
oppressed by the Nazis, in mass shootings, or through overwork, starvation
or disease. Auschwitz, the place which more than any symbolised the horror
of the Holocaust, was not a death camp, it was a slave labour camp.
Outwardly, Mr Irving portrayed himself as a liberal, who, like many of his
class and age, lamented the passing of the old England.
But his diaries showed him in a different light.
In April 1990, he attended a revisionist conference in Munich as its star
speaker. The previous evening he had been invited to a dinner organised by
Ewald Althans, a leading neo-Nazi.
Mr Irving wrote: "It ended with a Trinkspruch (toast) spoken by him to a
certain statesman whose 101st birthday falls today. All rose, toasted; I had
no glass, as I don't drink." The statesman in question was Adolf Hitler.
In 1993 Mr Irving was expelled from Germany and banned from re-entering the
country for the crime of denying the Holocaust. He would also be banned from
Canada and Australia.
His diaries also revealed a rhyme he had composed for his baby daughter,
Jessica. It went: "I am a Baby Aryan / Not Jewish or Sectarian / I have no
plans to marry/ an Ape or Rastafarian."
Mr Irving found it difficult to conceal his anti-Semitism. In an interview
in November 1998, he said: "The question which would concern me, if I was a
Jew, is not who pulled the trigger, but why? Why are we disliked? Is it
something we are doing? I'm disliked. David Irving is disliked. I know that,
because of the books I write.
"You people are disliked on a global scale. You have been disliked for 3,000
years and yet you never seem to ask what is at the root of this dislike.
"No sooner do you arrive as a people in a new country than within 50 years
you are already being disliked all over again. Now, what is it? And I don't
know the answer to this. Is it built into our microchip?"
Mr Irving was asked for the answer.
"I'm a racist," he said. "I would say they're a clever race. I would say
that as a race they are better at making money than I am. That's a racist
remark.
"But they appear to be better at making money than I am. If I was going to
be crude, I would say not only are they better at making money, but they are
greedy."
When Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, decided to write a book on
Holocaust denial, Mr Irving was bound to feature as one of its chief
practitioners.
The book was called Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory, published in Britain by Penguin in 1995. Prof Lipstadt accused Mr
Irving of being one of the most dangerous Holocaust deniers.
He had used his acknowledged expertise as a researcher of Nazi archives to
produce false history, she said. A sympathiser of the neo-Nazi cause, he was
seeking to rehabilitate fascism by exonerating Hitler from responsibility
for the Final Solution, and disproving the existence of the gas chambers.
Prof Lipstadt wrote: "Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for
Holocaust denial. Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until it
conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda."
It was bound to provoke a response from Mr Irving. Over the years he had
seen his income, once pounds 100,000 a year, shrink as publishers shunned
him. In 1996 his American publishers, St Martin's Press, abandoned
publication of his work, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, saying it
had been mistaken to take on a book that described Hitler as a reluctant
anti-Semite. The book had taken Mr Irving nine years to write.
In Britain, Mr Irving was being cold-shouldered by bookshops which were at
the same time stocking Prof Lipstadt's book. He sued Prof Lipstadt and her
publishers, Penguin Books, for libel.
The matter could have ended with an an apology and pounds 500 payment to a
charity of Mr Irving's choice if Penguin had wished, but the company decided
to fight the case as a matter of principle.
Prof Lipstadt, Professor of Jewish History at Emory University, Atlanta, was
a former adviser to the American Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.
She was raised in a traditional Jewish home, the daughter of German and
Polish emigres. During her career she had specialised in the Holocaust.
She explained: "Normally I don't debate with these people (Holocaust
deniers) on principle because I don't think they should be treated as `the
other side'. But if I had not fought, he (Irving) would have won by default
and people would have thought his version of the Holocaust to be a
legitimate definition."
For two months, the parties would argue over the minutiae of one of
history's darkest crimes, watched by a capacity audience.
Either through necessity or hubris, Mr Irving decided to dispense with
counsel and represent himself. Tall, burly, with blue pin-stripe straining
across his back, he cut a lone figure in the court on one side of the court.
On the other was Prof Lipstadt, almost lost among the formidable array of
legal firepower assembled for the defence.
At its head was Richard Rampton, QC, urbane veteran of the "McLibel" case.
Both sides had agreed to dispense with a jury, the issues being considered
too complex, so the decision rested solely with Mr Justice Gray.
Mr Irving accused Prof Lipstadt of being part of an "organised international
endeavour" by Jewish and Left-wing groups to destroy his career over 30
years. Being described as a Holocaust-denier was equivalent to being branded
a wife-beater or paedophile, he claimed. Mr Rampton responded: "Mr Irving
calls himself a historian. The truth is, however, that he is a falsifier of
history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar."
Throughout the case, Mr Rampton was to throw Mr Irving's words back at him,
whether written, or spoken to audiences of Right-wing extremists. First he
would prove that Mr Irving had falsified the historical record, then he
would lay bare his motives.
During cross-examination, Mr Irving said he believed that the total of
Jewish dead was between one and four million, not the six million generally
accepted.
Gassing had not been carried out on anything but an experimental scale. The
Jews who died were shot, starved and worked to death in slave labour camps
or fell victim to disease.
Auschwitz could not have coped. A million bodies weighed 100,000 tons,
making disposal a major logistical problem.
Mr Irving's justification for ridding the second edition of Hitler's War of
any mention of the Holocaust lay largely in the so-called Leuchter report.
Its author, Fred Leuchter, an American with experience of execution chambers
in his own country, concluded that the gas chambers of Auschwitz did not
exist.
In 1991, Mr Irving explained his reason for purging his book of the
Holocaust. "You won't find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even in
a footnote," he said. "Why should you? If something didn't happen, then you
don't even dignify it with a footnote."
But the defence showed that the Leuchter report was a deeply flawed document
written by a man with no formal training in engineering or forensic science.
Prof Robert Van Pelt, a Dutch architect who had made a study of Auschwitz,
dismissed Leuchter's analysis. He said there was an overwhelming body of
documentary and eye-witness evidence to show that a million Jews had been
exterminated in Auschwitz.
Giving evidence, Prof Van Pelt spoke of his visits to Auschwitz: "I was
frightened. I don't believe in ghosts, I have never seen one at Auschwitz,
but it is an awesome place, and an awesome responsibility as an historian.
In a map of human suffering Auschwitz would be at the centre."
Mr Irving had argued that even if there had been a Holocaust in the sense of
a planned extermination of the Jews, then it was not inspired by Hitler.
The defence commissioned a number of reports from leading academics to
examine Mr Irving's methods as a historian. They found that he had
deliberately misinterpreted documents. In one case he used an order that one
trainload of Jews should not be liquidated to suggest that Hitler had
forbidden the killing of all Jews.
In another, he misquoted an order issued by Heydrich to police across
Germany to suggest that Hitler had tried to stop the anti-Jewish pogrom of
Reichskristallnacht in November 1938.
Prof Richard Evans, of Cambridge University, who investigated Mr Irving's
use of documents, said he was not prepared for the "sheer depth of
duplicity" in his treatment of sources.
He concluded: "Irving is essentially an ideologue who uses history for his
own political purposes; he is not primarily concerned with discovering and
interpreting what happened in the past, he is concerned merely to give a
selective and tendentious account of it in order to further his own
ideological ends in the present.
"The true historian's primary concern, however, is with the past. That is
why, in the end, Irving is not a historian."
One day during the trial Mr Irving was approached outside court by a woman
who said her grandparents had died at Auschwitz in gas ovens. He replied:
"You may be pleased to know that they almost certainly died of typhus, as
did Anne Frank."
Irving libel trial: Key argument over gas chambers was based on discredited
report
Neil Tweddie
04/12/2000
The Daily Telegraph
IT WAS Prof Lipstadt's claims about Irving's methods as a historian that
formed the core of the defence case, writes Neil Tweedie.
She claimed that he had falsified and manipulated the historical record for
ideological purposes.
Her lawyers advanced 19 instances in which Irving had distorted evidence to
place Hitler in a more favourable light or to disprove the existence of the
Holocaust.
Irving, said Lipstadt and Penguin, was also guilty of distortion by
omission. In the case of Auschwitz, he failed to mention doubts surrounding
the evidence he used to disprove the existence of gas chambers.
The bedrock of his claim that the gas chambers at Auschwitz did not exist
and, by extension, that there were not any gas chambers at any camp, was the
report by Fred Leuchter, a self-taught expert in execution techniques
recruited in 1988 by lawyers acting for Ernst Zundel, a German national
living in Canada who was being prosecuted for denying the Holocaust in his
pamphlet Did Six Million Really Die?
Leuchter spent three days at Auschwitz-Birkenau and half a day at Majdanek,
concluding that the buildings at Auschwitz described as gas chambers were no
such thing.
He said there was no provision for gas-tight doors, and the chambers were
not properly sealed to prevent leakage. People depositing Zyklon B pellets
into vents would themselves fall victim to cyanide poisoning.
He said there were no vents to introduce the gas into the chambers or to
clear it once the gassing was completed.
Irving seized upon Leuchter's report as "shattering in the significance of
its discovery". But it was comprehensively demolished by the defence witness
Robert van Pelt, Professor of Architecture at Waterloo University in Canada.
Van Pelt pointed out that Leuchter was neither a trained engineer nor
forensic scientist. His evidence had been ruled inadmissible in the Zundel
trial.
Leuchter's claim that there were no gas-tight doors was worthless given the
evidence of SS officers who testified to their use. There was also
documentary evidence of orders for gasketed doors and ventilation equipment,
and Leuchter ignored testimony showing that gas masks were worn by guards
administering Zyklon B.
In his judgment, Mr Justice Gray concluded: "No objective fair-minded
historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at
Auschwitz."
Racist historian faces pounds 2m bill for libel defeat: Judge brands David
Irving a Holocaust denier who falsified the facts to exonerate Hitler
Neil Tweedie
04/12/2000
The Daily Telegraph
DAVID IRVING, the historian and author, was facing financial ruin last night
after defeat in his libel action against an American academic who accused
him of denying the existence of the Holocaust.
A High Court judge branded him a racist, anti-Semite and associate of
neo-Nazi extremists who falsified history in order to disprove the existence
of the gas chambers and exonerate Hitler from involvement in the mass murder
of Jews.
Mr Irving, 62, the author of some 30 works, faces a legal bill of about
pounds 2.3 million for the three-month trial. Mr Justice Gray, who decided
the case without a jury, warned him that he would be held liable for most of
the costs.
The verdict was applauded by Jewish groups around the world. The Simon
Wiesenthal Centre described it as "a victory of history over hate".
Mr Irving had sued Prof Deborah Lipstadt, an American Jewish scholar, and
her British publishers, Penguin Books, for remarks made in her book Denying
the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.
She accused him of being one of the most dangerous "Holocaust deniers", a
"Hitler partisan" who falsified, misrepresented and distorted history.
Mr Irving denied the allegations, claiming that they had resulted in his
being subjected to a wave of hatred. He said he had never claimed that the
Holocaust did not occur, but did question the number of Jewish dead and
denied their systematic extermination in gas chambers.
Delivering his judgment to a packed court, Mr Justice Gray said the
defendants had largely justified their allegations.
"The charges which I have found to be substantially true include the charges
that Mr Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and
deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for
the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable
light, principally in relation to his attitude towards and responsibility
for the treatment of the Jews; that he is an active Holocaust denier; that
he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with Right-wing
extremists who promote neo-Nazism."
Prof Lipstadt and Penguin had failed to justify some allegations, he said,
but set against the findings of the court, they did not have any material
effect on Mr Irving's reputation.
Mr Irving, who had represented himself against a formidable legal team
headed by Richard Rampton, QC, was forced to remove his jacket after an egg
was thrown at him as he entered court.
Following the two-hour hearing he said: "I would describe the judgment in
two words: firstly, indescribable and secondly, perverse."
He attacked some of the judge's conclusions as "historically incredible" and
poured scorn on the testimony of historians and other expert witnesses
called by the defence. "Their experts were speaking a load of baloney, but
mine spoke from the heart," he said.
Mr Irving, whose work as a military historian was praised by the judge, said
he would not be able to meet the costs. He plans to appeal.
His flat in Mayfair, west London, is believed to be heavily mortgaged, and
his opponents believe Mr Irving might move to America.
He said: "Why is everyone talking about money? I'm not interested in money.
It is all about reputation."
Prof Lipstadt, 53, who did not testify, said: "I feel incredibly vindicated
by the judge's ruling.
"It was an incredible relief. It went further in talking about Irving than I
did. It left no doubt that this man distorts, manipulates, perverts the
historical record, and it left his reputation as a man who has anything to
say about the Holocaust completely in tatters.
"The racist statements he has made and the way he tried to justify them in
court was horrible. It was evil."
Anthony Forbes Watson of Penguin said they had never been tempted to settle
out of court. "There are certain interests that supersede commercial
interests," he said.
Op-Ed
Disinfecting the Holocaust
Eliahu Salpeter
04/12/2000
Ha'aretz
Although British historian David Irving has lost the libel suit he brought
against American historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin
Books, for accusing him of denying the Holocaust and distorting history, the
trial - despite its focusing on whether or not Irving is a "Holocaust
denier" - is part of the processes that are promoting the gradual erasure of
the memory of the six million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis and
their collaborators.
The very fact that the trial concerned itself with details - such as whether
"only" three million Jews perished (as Irving claims), whether there were in
fact gas chambers and whether Hitler issued instructions for the
implementation of the Final Solution - actually paves the way for the
obliteration and denial of the Holocaust.
The road that ultimately leads to open denial of the Holocaust is not paved
just by malicious intentions. It begins in many places, the number of which
has recently increased. It is not only the Nazis and the anti-Semites who
are sinning against the truth. Even individuals with good intentions
sometimes present the Holocaust from angles that diminish its horrifying
nature. People find it difficult to repeatedly view the atrocities in a
direct manner and, apparently, film directors have come to understand this
point.
For example, the process can even begin with the diary of Anne Frank (whose
credibility is again being questioned by circles close to Holocaust
deniers). It is possible today to learn about what is contained in the diary
not only by reading the text itself or by visiting the place where Anne
wrote her entries. As of late 1999, there is now an animated film that has
turned the diary into a sort of fairy tale. Thus Anne's life becomes a story
about the fate of a charming young girl, a story that, despite its being
anchored in historical facts, is based on a sentimentalization of the diary.
The next stage in the distancing from concrete truth is the selection of
topics that, thanks to the success of the selection, become symbols. A
classic example is "Schindler's List." As we have begun to learn , Oskar
Schindler was not the only German to risk life and limb to save Jews.
However, individuals who displayed such heroism are a minority, and those
who consider Spielberg's film to be an accurate portrayal of reality are
falling victim to a loss of proportion.
The same can be said for another aspect of Holocaust documentation. The
books and films about the valor and courage of the ghetto fighters and
partisans - including the warriors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising - describe
the exception to the rule. Death in the course of armed struggle is
perceived as more dignified than the death of the helpless. Millions of Jews
were unable to defend themselves. The "selections" left no room for either
heroism or dignity, but they were an integral part of the terrible truth of
the Holocaust.
A path in the opposite direction, but which inevitably leads to the same
kind of distortion of the truth, is being paved by the so-called tragicomic
films that have become the latest rage. There is a bizarre humor in such
cinematic works as the "Train of Life" and "Jakob the Liar" - both of which
were screened in Israel in 1999. A striking symbol of the new genre is "Life
is Beautiful," a movie that landed its star, Roberto Benigni, an Oscar. No
learned discussion of the need for effective ways of teaching the Holocaust
today, no reports of thousands of moviegoers emerging from a screening with
tears in their eyes can make up for the distortion of both specific and
general truths: In Auschwitz, little children could not be told lies about
their fate because little children were sent straight to the gas chambers.
All attempts at establishing a link between concepts such as "Auschwitz" and
"Life is Beautiful" - no matter how sophisticated the attempt -cross the
permissible border of vulgarity. A taboo is violated and another opening is
found for making the denial of the Holocaust that much easier.
We should, however, not question the intentions of the institutions and
government organizations that have reconstructed German concentration camps
in order to enable millions of visitors to see with their own eyes how hell
was created by human hands in the 20th century. The agencies responsible for
the reconstruction work certainly had no intention of prettifying or
glossing over the truth.
However, those who remember Auschwitz or Dachau or Buchenwald and who visit
these reconstructed sites realize that the connection between the
reconstruction and the reality is very distant. The reason is not simply
that the structures have been cleaned up, renovated and repainted and that
they no longer contain the odor of sweat and urine or the screams of the SS
personnel and the kapos and the constant shadow of death. The atmosphere has
become disinfected - a showroom window has been created to protect the
viewers who are now standing on the other side, and the impression given is
that the experiences of the inmates were horrible, but somehow bearable.
This kind of impression makes it easier to forget the Holocaust, just as the
missing pipes that once linked the chimney (which has been reconstructed) to
the crematoriums (which have been renovated) enable the Holocaust deniers to
claim that all these items are stage props.
From this standpoint, the museums, such as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, declare in advance that they can offer only
a secondhand experience, that they can only present facts that might be able
to convince a sane individual, although they might have no impact on
dyed-in-the-wool Holocaust deniers. An effective war on Holocaust denial
must be conducted at two levels: The historical facts must be given in
school and must appear in history textbooks, but there must also be
legislation banning Holocaust denial. Anne Frank's diary, "Schindler's List"
and the memoirs of Holocaust survivors are important for reinforcing what
has been taught and for creating the sense of an emotionally experienced
truth; however, they are not sufficiently powerful to convince those who
refuse to believe all this happened.
Those who attempt to present the Holocaust as a background to some tale of
smart-aleck Jews, or to a comedy, a romance or a heroic epic - and there
were humorous, romantic and heroic tales that unfolded even during the
Holocaust - are running the risk of blurring the borderline between the
terrible truth of the Holocaust and the world of fantas.
nternational News
Irving loses libel case in Holocaust denial suit British judge throws out
historian's complaint against U.S. professor, branding the controversial
British author a racist and an anti-Semite
ALAN FREEMAN
The Globe and Mail, Reuter News Agency
04/12/2000
The Globe and Mail
London -- Historian David Irving emerged unrepentant yesterday after losing
a landmark libel case, launching into a denial that the gas chambers at
Auschwitz had existed and suggesting that Jews were responsible for their
own fate at the hands of the Nazis.
A British judge threw out his libel case against a U.S. academic, and
branded the controversial British historian a racist, an anti-Semite and a
Holocaust denier who twists the facts to suit his ideological aims.
"I can't be intimidated," said Mr. Irving, who plans to appeal the ruling
even though he now faces a legal bill of close to $4.5-million. "Even if
they take everything away, they will not destroy me. I can't be bought."
In a television interview, Mr. Irving accused "self-appointed leaders of the
Jewish community" in Britain and abroad of trying to destroy his life. He
also repeated his comment, made during a speaking tour of Canada in 1991,
that more women had died in the back seat of Ted Kennedy's car at
Chappaquidick than had died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
He also wouldn't back away from the statements that led the judge to
determine that Mr. Irving was anti-Semitic.
Asked whether he still believed that Jews brought the Holocaust on
themselves, Mr. Irving responded: "If I were a Jew, I would want to know not
who pulled the trigger when I'm lying at the bottom of a pit in Russia or
Riga or Minsk . . . I would want to know why. What is it that has generated
the anti-Semitism and the xenophobia and the hatred around the world that
makes us Jews again and again the victims of pogroms?"
As for his comments that Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal has a "hideous,
leering, evil face," Mr. Irving burst out laughing and responded: "It's
true, have you ever seen him? But this isn't anti-Semitism, this is
anti-uglyism."
Deborah Lipstadt, who teaches at Emery University in Atlanta, was sued by
Mr. Irving for defamation over her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.
Ms. Lipstadt was ecstatic after the victory, which was delivered yesterday
to a packed courtroom weeks after the prolonged trial ended.
"I feel exceptionally vindicated in what has been five years of excruciating
effort on my part," Ms. Lipstadt said. "I see this not only as a personal
victory but also as a victory for all those who speak out against hate and
violence."
In his 330-page ruling, Judge Charles Gray said the 62-year-old Mr. Irving
"for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately
misrepresented historical evidence," that he portrayed [former Nazi leader
Adolf] Hitler in an unwarrantedly sympathetic light and that he is "an
active Holocaust denier."
"He is anti-Semitic and racist and he associates with right-wing extremists
who promote neo-Nazism." Mr. Irving, who handled his own defence, was pelted
with eggs by demonstrators as he entered the Royal Courts of Justice
yesterday for the judgment.
Mr. Irving is a self-taught historian whose best-known book is a biography
of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels; the judge even commended him for the
quality of his works on military history.
But Mr. Irving also has long argued that Hitler knew nothing about the
so-called Final Solution for Europe's Jews, and that Jews were killed by
firing squads on the eastern front but not in gas chambers in death camps.
Weighing the evidence from a series of eminent historians who testified
during the trial, the judge said "no objective, fair-minded historian would
have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and
that they were operated on a substantial scale to kills hundreds of
thousands of Jews."
Mr. Irving may face personal bankruptcy after the judge ordered him to pay
the legal costs of Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin Books, joint defendants in the
case.
Penguin, a subsidiary of Pearson PLC, said in a press release that it plans
to make efforts to recover as much of its costs as possible but "will
certainly be left significantly out of pocket."
The publisher added that it believed from the start that it had a duty to
stand behind Ms. Lipstadt and its right to publish.
Ms. Lipstadt said she didn't believe Britain or other countries should take
Germany's lead and make Holocaust denial a crime. "I don't think those laws
really work. They tend to make martyrs of the deniers."
Ms. Lipstadt emphasized that she and Penguin hadn't taken out the lawsuit,
that Mr. Irving had sued them. "This was not an attempt to silence someone
else. This was an attempt to silence me."
She added that it was important to fight this case for the sake of Hitler's
victims, and that it was particularly important to establish the truth of
what happened when there are still survivors alive.
"There is a finite amount of time for them to be there and tell their
stories in the first person. It will soon be easier to deny it."
Meanwhile, Mr. Irving defended himself from the judge's comments by
commenting that he couldn't possibly be a racist. In the 32 years he has
lived in his apartment on London's swank Grosvenor Square, he said, he has
employed "probably a dozen girls working as my personal assistants who come
from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Jamaica, Barbados, et cetera, et cetera."
But in his ruling, Judge Gray cited a ditty that Mr. Irving had composed for
his youngest daughter as evidence of his racism: "I am a baby Aryan . . . I
have no plans to marry an ape or a Rastafarian."
On his personal Web site yesterday, Mr. Irving continued the kind of
vitriolic attacks that have long made him a favourite on the far-right
speaking circuit and have resulted in his being barred from entering several
countries, including Canada.
In a comment on the judgment, Mr. Irving accused Seagram Co., the Canadian
distilling and entertainment giant, and its chairman, Edgar Bronfman, of
helping to finance the defence in the libel case, and attacked the company
generally.
Contacted in New York, a Seagram Co. spokeswoman could not say whether the
company had provided any assistance to the defence team. In addition to his
post at Seagram, Mr. Bronfman is president of the World Jewish Congress.
THE JUDGE'S WORDS
Here are key quotes from Judge Charles Gray, ruling in Britain's High Court
against a libel action brought by controversial historian David Irving.
"[Irving] is an active Holocaust denier . . . anti-Semitic and racist." "The
picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his extracurricular
activities revealed him to be a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist." "It appears
to me to be incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier.
Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and
asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent occasions
and sometimes in the most offensive terms." "He is content to mix with
neo-Fascists and appears to share many of their racist and anti-Semitic
prejudices. "He has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light,
principally in relation to his attitude toward and responsibility for the
treatment of the Jews."
"The charges which I have found substantially true include the charges that
Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence." Reuters
News And Features; International News
Irving Loses Libel Battle
By Simon Mann
Herald Correspondent
04/12/2000
Sydney Morning Herald
The revisionist historian David Irving has lost his long-running legal
battle to defend his controversial views on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany.
Britain's High Court ruled last night that a US academic had not libelled
Irving when she described him as a ``Holocaust denier'' in a book published
five years ago. Justice Gray said Irving's reputation had not been damaged
by the claims.
The decision was immediately welcomed by Jewish groups, who have campaigned
against increasing assertions by revisionists that there was no systematic
slaughter of Jews by the Nazis in World War II.
Irving, 62, had told the court he had never claimed that the Holocaust did
not occur, but he did question the number of Jews killed and denied their
systematic extermination in concentration camp gas chambers.
He had sued Professor Deborah Lipstadt and publisher Penguin over her 1995
book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. The
work, he said, had destroyed his livelihood and generated waves of hatred
against him.
The publishers and Professor Lipstadt, 53, holder of the Dorot chair in
Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, had
denied Irving's charge and pleaded justification.
Lawyers for the defendants told the court that Irving ``distorts,
mis-states, misquotes and falsifies'' historical records to justify his
anti-Semitic views. Mr Richard Rampton, QC, said Irving was ``a right-wing
extremist, a racist and in particular a rabid anti-Semite'' who had
forfeited his reputation in pursuit of his obsessive desire to exonerate
Hitler.
During the month-long trial Irving, who represented himself, said he did not
believe Hitler knew about the extermination of Jews until 1943. He also said
the existence of specially marked genocidal gas chambers at Auschwitz was
fictitious and that trains said to be a part of the killing program were
used to take Jews to a new life in Eastern Europe.
``I know of no other historian or writer who has been subjected to a
campaign of vilification even one-tenth as intense,'' he said. But he denied
he was a racist. ``My views are independent and sometimes unorthodox, but
never anti-democratic. I am not anti-Semitic.''
Irving did not offer an immediate reaction to the verdict and faces a huge
legal bill as a result of his loss. Before the verdict he said even if he
did lose, the case would enhance his reputation as someone brave enough to
stand up to the establishment: ``I've been able to take them on
single-handed and give them a good run for their money.''
Courtroom observers who listened to the verdict included prominent British
Jews and the Israeli ambassador.
Mr Eldred Tabachnik, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews,
said: ``The decision proves that David Irving is a falsifier of history and
a Nazi sympathiser whose aim has been to sanitise Nazism and to absolve
Hitler of the guilt of the Holocaust.''
*Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, 79, a Swiss revisionist who published articles
denying the Holocaust happened and questioning the existence of Nazi gas
chambers and that six million Jews died in World War II, was jailed in
Lausanne on Monday for one year under Swiss anti-racist laws, Agence
France-Presse reported.
U.S. WRITER WINS BATTLE WITH HOLOCAUST DENIER
Ray Moseley, Tribune Foreign Correspondent
04/12/2000
Chicago Tribune
In the first major court case focusing on the historical truth of the
Holocaust, British historian David Irving lost his libel battle Tuesday with
an American academic who had branded him a partisan of Adolf Hitler and a
Holocaust denier.
International Jewish groups applauded the unsparing British court verdict
against Irving, the most prominent among revisionists around the world who
have challenged and derided the accepted view of one of history's most
heinous crimes.
In a 333-page judgment, Justice Charles Gray ruled that Irving, 62, was an
anti-Semite and a racist who had deliberately distorted historical evidence
to deny the Holocaust and to try to exonerate Hitler from responsibility for
the mass murder of Jews. The verdict shredded Irving's reputation and
exposed him to possible financial and professional ruin.
Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in Atlanta, the defendant in
the case, hailed the ruling as "not only a personal victory but a victory
for all those who speak out against hate and prejudice." She said the case
had "eaten up five years of my life."
The ruling also was a victory for Penguin Books, her British publisher.
Pelted by eggs as he entered the court building Tuesday, Irving slipped out
a side entrance afterward. Reached later by telephone at his home, he said
he had two words to describe the ruling: "The first is unprintable, and the
second is `perverse,'" he said.
"The judgment is so laden with historical inaccuracies that the grounds for
an appeal in the public interest are very evident," he said. "The first 200
pages are pure sunshine, but then suddenly it clouds over. The judge picks
up the bucket of slime prepared by the defense counsel and tips it over me."
Gray indicated he will assess Irving for most of the defendants' $3.1
million in costs.
Asked whether that would bankrupt him, Irving laughed and said, "Why is
everybody so interested in money?"
He did not elaborate except to indicate he will challenge being asked to
reimburse the high fees paid to some defense expert witnesses.
He said he had no regrets about having brought the suit.
Gray rejected Irving's request for approval to appeal the ruling but said it
would be up to the Court of Appeal to decide whether the public interest is
sufficient to justify its hearing the case. At an earlier stage, Irving had
said he would not appeal because he was forced to act as his own attorney
and lacked the legal expertise for appeal proceedings.
The judge's ruling came almost a month after the end of an eight- week trial
that was seen by many as a definitive showdown between those who deny the
Holocaust happened and those who defend historical truth.
However, Gray said it was not his function to find what actually happened
during the Nazi regime but rather to judge Irving's treatment of available
evidence. Lipstadt also said she did not believe the truth of the Holocaust
was involved, as she considered that to be proved.
"This is about a man who is a liar," she said. "This was about a man who
purports to be a historian making it up, perverting truth."
She expressed confidence that no reputable institution in the U.S. would now
give Irving a "platform to spread his perverted and distorted views." In the
past he has spoken to a number of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in
the U.S.
At a news conference after the ruling, Lipstadt fought back tears when she
described the most moving moment of the proceedings for her. "It happened
many times, when I walked out of court and was enveloped by survivors who
said, `Thank you.' It was overwhelming to me to be thanked by them."
She said she expected the ruling would have no effect on neo- Nazis and
other Holocaust deniers. "There is no end to the battle against Holocaust
deniers," she said.
In her 1995 book "Denying the Holocaust," Lipstadt accused Irving of being a
Hitler partisan and a Holocaust denier. That was the basis of his libel suit
against her and Penguin Books.
Irving has acknowledged hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed by the
Nazis but denied that 6 million had been slain. He also has denied there
were gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp.
In his book, "Hitler's War," he asserted that the Nazi dictator had not
known about the killing of Jews until 1943 and had not approved of it.
Gray's rulings on nearly all the points in question was unsparing of
Irving's long-tarnished reputation. Gray commented on 19 allegations raised
by the defendants and sustained most of them, describing Irving's views with
such terms as "perverted," "wholly untenable" and having "a distinct air of
unreality about them."
"I have come to the conclusion that the criticisms advanced by the
defendants are almost invariably well-founded," he said. "Irving has
significantly misrepresented what the evidence, objectively examined,
reveals."
In court, Gray read a 66-page summary of his findings, taking almost two
hours to do so. Irving, stripped of his suit jacket because of the eggs that
pelted it, sat stony-faced throughout.
On two fundamental points, Gray offered these opinions:
"No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that
there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a
substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews."
"It appears to me to be incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a
Holocaust denier. Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers ...
he has done so on frequent occasions and sometimes in the most offensive
terms."
Gray then dealt with the allegations of anti-Semitism and racism.
"Irving is anti-Semitic," he said. "His words are directed against Jews,
either individually or collectively, [and] are by turns hostile, critical,
offensive and derisory in their references to Semitic people, their
characteristics and appearances."
He agreed with Irving that Jews are not immune from criticism but said
Irving had repeatedly crossed the divide between legitimate criticism and
"prejudiced vilification of the Jewish race and people."
He said Irving's racism was proved by his negative comments in a speech
about a black television news broadcaster and his proclaimed queasiness on
seeing blacks playing cricket for England. Gray also found that Irving had
associated with extreme right-wing, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in
Germany and the U.S.
He ruled that Irving's misrepresentations of historical evidence were not
accidental but deliberate, as shown by the fact that he often gave credence
to unreliable evidence and ignored credible evidence and that none of his
misrepresentations cast Hitler in an unfavorable light.
"The evidence has been deliberately slanted by Irving," he said.
Gray ruled that Lipstadt had defamed Irving in claiming that he planned to
speak at a conference attended by terrorists, that he keeps a portrait of
Hitler over his desk and that he broke an agreement with Russian authorities
concerning some archive material.
But he said these defamations did not have a material effect on Irving's
reputation when weighed against the charges that were proved.
Penguin Books Chief Executive Anthony Forbes Watson said after the ruling
that Penguin expects to be left "significantly out of pocket" because of
Irving's inability to pay the full costs. He said Penguin would seek to
recover as much money as possible.
"Sometimes principles override cost considerations," he said. "I hope the
fact we won will encourage other publishers to stand up and not be
intimidated."
Eldred Tabachnik, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said
the decision shows Irving was "a falsifier of history and a Nazi sympathizer."
The Simon Wiesenthal Center hailed it as a "victory of history over hate."
Critic of a Holocaust Denier Is Cleared in British Libel Suit
By SARAH LYALL
04/12/2000
The New York Times
LONDON, April 11 -- He sought to present himself as a legitimate historian
with contrarian views on the Holocaust. But the British writer David Irving
lost a libel case today when a judge declared that he was in fact an
''active Holocaust denier.''
The case has been closely watched by people alarmed at the rising tide of
Hitler apologists and neo-Nazis who say there was no Nazi program to put the
Jews of Europe to death, or who argue that the scale of the Holocaust has
been greatly overstated.
At issue were a number of assertions in ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing
Assault on Truth and Memory,'' a book first published in 1993 in the United
States by Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust
studies at Emory University in Atlanta.
In the book, Ms. Lipstadt wrote that Mr. Irving, now 62, was ''one of the
most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial'' and said that ''he is at
his most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to conform to
his conclusions.''
Holocaust denial is not a crime in Britain, as it is in Germany. But Mr.
Irving, the author of more than 30 books on World War II and the Holocaust,
some of which historians have praised, sued Ms. Lipstadt and her publisher,
Penguin Books, saying that the book had severely damaged his reputation as a
historian.
He brought the suit here because British libel law puts the burden on the
defendants -- in this case, Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin -- to prove the truth
of their assertions.
The judge, Charles Gray of the British high court, handed a resounding
victory to Ms. Lipstadt. In a scathing ruling notable for its stern wording,
he declared that Mr. Irving was a racist Holocaust denier who deliberately
distorted historical evidence in order to cast Hitler in a favorable light.
Mr. Irving's treatment of history, he said, was often ''perverse and
egregious.''
Under British law, Mr. Irving, who represented himself at the trial, is
responsible for paying the costs incurred by Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin.
Lawyers for Ms. Lipstadt said the costs were likely to exceed $3 million.
Mr. Irving said he would seek permission to appeal.
Commenting on the rulingduring a trip to Washington, Prime Minister Ehud
Barak of Israel said: ''The strength of Israel today ensures that today no
second Holocaust will take place, and no one in the world will dare rise
against the Jewish nation. But in parallel, a determined struggle is going
on against the people who deny the Holocaust that brought the death of a
third of our nation.''
In the early years of his career, Mr. Irving wrote a number of admired
books, notably ''Hitler's War'' (1977), and Justice Gray today praised his
dogged use of primary sources and said that ''as a military historian, Mr.
Irving has much to commend him.''
But in recent years, Mr. Irving's views have become more and more extreme
and he has been linked with right-wing groups and neo-Nazis.
In 1992 he was fined and banned from Germany after he was convicted under
the German law that makes Holocaust denial a crime. He has also been refused
entry to Canada, Italy, Austria and Australia.
Among other things, Mr. Irving has said that the gas chambers at Auschwitz
were not used to kill people -- Jews who died there suffered from typhus and
other diseases, he argues -- and that Hitler neither ordered nor approved
the Nazis' plans to systematically put Europe's Jews to death. In fact, he
has argued, Hitler did not know about the mass killings until at least 1943.
And while Mr. Irving has acknowledged that many Jews died during World War
II, he has also said it was logistically impossible for the number to have
been in the millions.
In 1996 St. Martin's Press withdrew his biography of the Nazi propagandist
Josef Goebbels, which contends that Goebbels, not Hitler, was behind the
murder of the Jews.
In the trial, Mr. Irving used the withdrawal as evidence that Ms. Lipstadt's
book had fanned the flames of an ''organized international endeavor'' to
destroy his career.
To prove the merit of Ms. Lipstadt's statements about Mr. Irving, her
lawyers presented testimony from a number of Holocaust historians who picked
apart many of Mr. Irving's conclusions, showing them to be based on
deliberate distortions and selective use of facts.
In his denunciation of Mr. Irving's credibility, Justice Gray said, in
essence, that Mr. Irving had no case. The judge refuted his argument that
any misrepresentations he might have made were inadvertent.
''Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence,'' the judge said. ''For
the same reasons, he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable
light, particularly in relation to his attitude toward and responsibility
for the treatment of the Jews.'' Mr. Irving, he concluded, is ''an active
Holocaust denier'' and anti-Semite who ''associates with right-wing
extremists who promote neo-Nazism.''
After the ruling, a jubilant Ms. Lipstadt, 53, said Mr. Irving had been
''hoist on his own petard,'' with his own evidence, and exposed as a liar.
''This was not about versions of the truth,'' she said. ''This wasn't about
a historian with a controversial view of history. This was about a man who
claims to be a historian making up, distorting, perverting, manipulating.''
Mr. Irving, who was splattered with a raw egg by a protester as he went to
court this morning, so that he sat through the judge's ruling in his
shirtsleeves and vest, slipped out a back door after the decision and did
not speak to reporters. But he told the Press Association in an interview in
his apartment in Mayfair that he found the ruling ''perverse'' and
''historically incredible.''
He accused Ms. Lipstadt and Penguin of enlisting the help of ''the leaders
of the Jewish communities around the world'' in an orchestrated effort to
discredit him. ''Their method was to pour a bucket of slime over me and say,
'Look, he's covered in slime,' '' he said.
''I am not at all anti-Semitic,'' he added. ''It is not anti-Semitic to be
critical of the Jews.''
Anthony Julius, a lawyer for Ms. Lipstadt, said the case was not about
whether the Holocaust took place, but whether there was any evidence to
support Mr. Irving's views.
''We put the focus on his writing and proved that it wasn't up to
standard,'' he said. ''It's important to secure definitive rulings against
Holocaust deniers, to send them back into the anti-Semitic ghetto from which
they came.''
In a statement, Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the dean and
associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, called the
ruling a ''victory of history over hate'' and said it put an end to Mr.
Irving's career.
''Today's decision definitively places Irving where he belongs -- not as an
historian, but as a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the
most heinous crime in human history,'' the rabbis said. ''Irving tried to
manipulate the British legal system in order to put the victims murdered in
the gas chambers on trial; instead, the net result is that he will be
relegated to the garbage heap of history's haters.''
'He is a Holocaust denier. He misstated evidence': The judgment Judge
condemns deliberate falsification of historical record
DAVID PALLISTER
04/12/2000
The Guardian
In an emphatic and damning 334-page judgment Mr Justice Gray branded David
Irving a racist anti-semite who for 'his own ideological reasons
persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical
evidence'.
He said Irving was 'an active Holocaust denier' who associated with neo-Nazi
extremists. The 62-year-old historian's ideological views led him to portray
Hitler 'in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his
attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews'.
He ruled that the defence of justification by the American academic Deborah
Lipstadt and Penguin over her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing
Assault on Truth and Memory, had succeeded.
The judge said the central issue was Irving's treatment of the available
evidence: 'It is no part of my function to attempt to make findings as to
what actually happened during the Nazi regime. The distinction may be a fine
one but it is important to bear it in mind.'
Offering a grain of comfort to Irving, he said: 'My assessment is that, as a
military historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of
military history Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research
into the archives.
'He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many documents
which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years.
'It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and dealt with a
sustained and penetrating crossexamination that his knowledge of world war
two is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the historical documents
is remarkable. He is beyond question able and intelligent.
'But the questions to which this action has given rise do not relate to the
quality of Irving's military history but rather to the manner in which he
has written about the attitude adopted by Hitler towards the Jews and in
particular his responsibility for the fate which befell them under the Nazi
regime.'
Overall, he said, Irving had 'treated the historical evidence in a manner
which fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious
historian'.
The judge said the respondents had selected 19 instances where they
contended Irving had in one way or another distorted the evidence. He noted
that many of the documents he had to analyse were chosen by Irving himself
who claimed they demonstrated Hitler was a friend of the Jews. 'I have come
to the conclusion that the criticisms advanced by the defendants are almost
invariably well-founded.'
On the central question of Hitler's attitude to the Jews, the judge
concluded that Irving's submissions had 'a distinct air of unreality about
them'. 'In the result the picture which he provides to readers of Hitler and
his attitude towards the Jews is at odds with the evidence. It is common
ground between the parties that until the latter part of 1941, the solution
to the Jewish question which Hitler preferred was their mass deportation.'
The respondents, however, claimed that from the end of 1941 onwards 'the
policy of which Hitler knew and approved was the extermination of Jews in
huge numbers. Irving on the other hand argued that Hitler continued to be
the Jews' friend at least until October 1943'.
'The unreality of Irving's stance, as I see it, derives from his persistence
in that claim, despite his acceptance in the course of this trial that the
evidence shows that Hitler knew about and approved of the wholesale shooting
of Jews in the east and, later, was complicit in the gassing of hundreds of
thousands of Jews in the Reinhard and other death camps.'
He said Irving had accepted he was wrong in telling audiences in Australia,
Canada and the US that the shooting of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen death
squads was done without Hitler's approval.
Hitler was incontrovertibly, rabidly anti-semitic, the judge said, and spoke
in sinister and menacing tones about Jews. He rejected Irving's claim that
Hitler had stopped being anti-semitic after 1933.
On the issue of Auschwitz the judge said the central question of the case
was whether the evidence supported the respondents' contention that the
number of deaths ran into hundreds of thousands or whether Irving was right
when he claimed the killing by gas was on a modest scale.
He said the cumulative effect of the documentary evidence for the genocidal
operation of gas chambers at Auschwitz was 'considerable'.
'No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that
there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a
substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews.'
Mr Justice Gray said it appeared to him to be 'incontrovertible' that Irving
was a Holocaust denier.
'Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and
asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent occasions
and sometimes in the most offensive terms.
'By way of examples, I cite his story of the Jew climbing into a mobile
telephone box-cum-gas chamber; his claim that more people died in the back
of Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers at
Auschwitz; his dismissal of the eyewitnesses en masse as liars or as
suffering from a mental problem; and his reference to an Association of
Auschwitz Survivors and Other Liars or 'ASSHOLS'.'
He rejected as untrue the claim made by Irving in his evidence that in his
denial of the existence of any gas chambers at Auschwitz, he was referring
solely to the gas chamber constructed by the Poles after the war for the
benefit of visitors to the site or, as Irving put it, as a 'tourist
attraction'.
Irving had also made broader claims which 'tend to minimise the Holocaust',
said the judge. He had minimised the number of those killed by means other
than gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere.
On anti-semitism, the judge said it appeared to him undeniable that most, if
not all, of the statements made by Irving and cited by the respondents as
demonstrating his anti-semitism, revealed 'clear evidence that, in the
absence of any excuse or suitable explanation for what he said or wrote,
Irving is anti-semitic'.
He added: 'His words are directed against Jews, either individually or
collectively, in the sense that they are by turns hostile, critical,
offensive and derisory in their references to semitic people, their
characteristics and appearances.'
Examples included Irving's claims that Jews deserved to be disliked; that
they had brought the Holocaust on themselves; that Jews generated
anti-semitism by their greed and mendacity; that Jews were among the scum of
humanity and that they scurried and hid furtively, unable to stand the light
of day. Irving's principal explanation or justification for his comments
about Jews was that he was seeking to explain to Jews why anti-semitism
existed, said the judge.
'But I do not think that this was the message that Irving was seeking to
convey to his audiences and it was certainly not the sense in which his
remarks were understood. It appears to me that Irving has repeatedly crossed
the divide between legitimate criticism and prejudiced vilification of the
Jewish race and people.'
There was also ample evidence of Irving's racism. Mr Justice Gray cited the
ditty composed by Irving for his daughter:
'I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.'
As a historian, the judge said: 'Irving appears to take every opportunity to
exculpate Hitler.' Yet on numerous occasions, 'Irving has misstated
historical evidence; adopted positions which run counter to the weight of
the evidence; given credence to unreliable evidence and disregarded or
dismissed credible evidence.' The question is, whether his
misrepresentations were deliberate.
'Over the past 15 years or so, Irving appears to have become more
politically active than was previously the case. He speaks regularly at
political or quasi-political meetings in Germany, the United States, Canada
and the new world. The content of his speeches and interviews often displays
a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias.
'He makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime
which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities which they
inflicted on the Jews. He is content to mix with neo-fascists and appears to
share many of their racist and anti-semitic prejudices.'
Mr Justice Gray roundly concluded: 'The picture of Irving which emerges from
the evidence of his extracurricular activities reveals him to be a rightwing
pro-Nazi polemicist. In my view the defendants have established that Irving
has a political agenda. It is one which, it is legitimate to infer, disposes
him, where he deems it necessary, to manipulate the historical record in
order to make it conform with his political beliefs.
'It appears to me that the correct and inevitable inference must be that for
the most part the falsification of the historical record was deliberate and
that Irving was motivated by a desire to present events in a manner
consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion
and manipulation of historical evidence.'
Author with no publisher and few funds landed with pounds 2.5m bill: The
backers Supporters in US but 'not neo-Nazis' are main donors
FIACHRA GIBBONS
04/12/2000
The Guardian
David Irving admitted his finances were on a knife edge even as he began his
ruinous libel action. 'They are out to ruin me,' he told the Guardian
yesterday. 'They want to take my work from me, my reputation and my home.'
Ranged against him, in what he liked to paint as a 'David and Goliath
struggle', were Penguin and the American academic Deborah Lipstadt, who he
claimed were bankrolled by the 'traditional enemies of truth'.
In fact, the brunt of the pounds 2.5m cost of assembling the Lipstadt team
was met by the publishers, though the Bronfman family, leading figures in
the World Jewish Congress and owners of the distillers Seagrams, are
believed to have made sizeable contributions.
Included in the pounds 2.5m that Irving will now have to pay comes the
pounds 343,000 costs of Richard Rampton QC, the barrister who gave him such
a roasting in court. Irving, however, looks to be in no position to pay that
sort of money.
He may live in a large Mayfair apartment but as the Guardian today reveals
he has mortgaged it to the hilt. Without a publisher for almost 10 years, he
has had to rely on his own precarious imprint Focal Point. As well as
writing and printing his own books, Irving drives the van to deliver them to
those bookshops still prepared to sell them.
He also has two young daughters and his Danish wife, Bente, to support. Set
against this, Irving's only real earnings of late have been in the courts.
He was paid an estimated pounds 75,000 by the Sunday Times in 1994 in an
out-of-court settlement after they tried to disassociate themselves from him
in the furore that followed his translation of the Goebbels diaries.
Irving already has a bankruptcy writ against him in the US to recover unpaid
costs from a libel case he brought against the Jewish Board of Deputies six
years ago.The only real asset he appeared to have left is a holiday
apartment in the fashionable Florida island of Key West, where he retreated
to compose himself in the weeks before the verdict. But this, in fact, is
held in the name of a Sam Dixon, an Atlanta lawyer who has acted for the Ku
Klux Klan.
Having at first refused to give details of the '4,000 people around the
world who have contributed to my cause' for fear of leaving them liable for
his costs, Irving has now revealed his big backers were American.
One US donor, he said, handed him Dollars 50,000 in cash in a brown paper
bag at Amsterdam airport two years ago, and within the past month a banker's
draft for pounds 10,000 was sent to him from New York. (As if to prove how
deep his well of support in the States is, even as he lost in the high
court, Irving was still organising a two-day 'real history' conference in
Cincinnati in September.)
Despite the fact that extremist websites carry links to his appeals for
cash, Irving denies any of his funds come from neo-Nazis.
The New York-based Anti-Defamation League said they would be 'shocked' if he
was not getting money from supporters of the far-right National Alliance,
National Association For the Advancement Of White People and the denialist
Committee For Open Debate On The Holocaust.
Jewish organisations also suspect several of Irving's most consistent
backers are German. Although he is banned from the country, he holds a bank
account there and has been championed by the hard right German People's
Union (DVU).
A party spokesman in Munich refused to say yesterday whether it had funded
him but described Irving 'as a good man and a seeker of the truth'.
Last night Irving said: 'When I have got money from Germany it comes in
occasional 500 Deutschmark notes from a rather sweet old lady.'
History's verdict on Holocaust upheld: The evidence Historians claim victory
after rigorous courtroom test
STEPHEN MOSS
04/12/2000
The Guardian
It was, said the Simon Wiesenthal centre yesterday, 'a victory for history
over hate.' It was also a victory for the historians who had left their
seminar rooms and lined up with the defendant, Deborah Lipstadt, in court to
attempt to destroy David Irving's reputation as a historian.
Mr Justice Gray, in his devastating judgment, said the issue had been
Irving's treatment of the available evidence. 'It is no part of my function
to attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi
regime,' he said. 'The distinction may be a fine one but it is important to
bear it in mind.'
'This wasn't a trial about what happened in the second world war, it was a
trial about Irving's methodology,' said Richard Evans, professor of modern
history at Cambridge university, who gave evidence on behalf of Ms Lipstadt.
'A serious historian has to take account of all the evidence. Irving does
not do this; he fabricates.'
Mr Evans, who spent six days in the witness box, said the experience had
left him with a high opinion of the legal process. 'We had limitless time in
court. The trial lasted for three months and there was a chance to thrash
everything out. The historians acquitted themselves well under the most
offensive cross-examination from Irving. It is important for historians to
say we can be objective.'
David Cesarani, professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton
university, said Mr Evans's report had destroyed Irving's reputation as a
historian: 'The defence showed that Irving massaged documents and that was
crucial.
'Irving disputes the definition of the term Holocaust. He uses it to refer
to all the civilians who were killed in the war, including Jews. He denies
Hitler engineered the slaughter and that it was systematic; his view defies
reason.
'Holocaust denial is not just about the past; it's about now and it's about
the future. It's about rehabilitating Nazism. It might appear academic for
us, but in parts of Europe it's a vital issue.'
David Cesarani said it was important for historians to take part in public
debates, but had doubts about translating historical argument to a court of
law.
'Evidence in history is not like evidence in court,' he said. 'Much of the
discussion in the case hinged on the word Vernichtung - annihilation: but
does it mean physical annihilation or removal?
'In a court of law, context and circumstance are the least important
evidence; they may be deemed inadmissible, not real evidence. The court
wants physical evidence, a fingerprint that no one can argue with, but in
history context and circumstance matter a great deal.'
The 'fingerprint' in this case was Irving's massaging of the sources; only
by concentrating on his methodology could the case be contained.
He was exposed as, in the words of Eldred Tabachnik, president of the Board
of Deputies of British Jews, 'a falsifier of history'. The corollary is that
his revisionist history of the Third Reich also collapses.
Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners, said it was
ridiculous that Irving's views had ever been taken seriously. 'The Holocaust
is an established historical fact,' he said. 'That the de niers and their
fellow travellers have gotten a discussion going at all is absurd; denying
the Holocaust is like denying that there was slavery in the US or that the
second world war happened at all.'
Mr Goldhagen is sceptical of the interplay between history and the legal
process: 'The ruling of a court has no bearing on historical fact: the court
is a place where legal issues are adjudicated according to the particular
legal standards of a given country, not where historical issues are decided
according to the different and well-established standards of historical
scholarship.'
But as Steve Paulsson, senior historian for the Imperial War Museum's
forthcoming Holocaust exhibition, argues, the Holocaust was not on trial:
'The Holocaust was a reality. Holocaust deniers focus on the trees rather
than the forest. It is a fact, based on demographic evidence, that 5m-6m
Jews died.
'The Holocaust has its uses and abuses. It has been used politically by
various people. People in different countries read their own national agenda
into it. But as a historical fact it is as well established as the second
world war itself.'
'Welcome to the world of real history,' says the home page of Irving's
website. 'A thorough revision of Hitler's War [Irving's best-known book,
first published in 1977] will be released later this month. I have found it
necessary to correct only one factual error in the light of this trial; and
I have introduced the SS police decodes of December 1, 1941 as further proof
that Hitler's headquarters were vigorously opposed to the liquidation of
German Jews then beginning.'
For Irving, it appears that the war continues. But the world of real history
has moved on.
How the web of lies was unravelled: Fight for truth Academics spent four
years identifying distortions and manipulations in work of bogus historian
VIKRAM DODD
04/12/2000
The Guardian
By the 32nd and final day of his libel trial, David Irving was tired from
the strain of representing himself in court. His exhaustion helped to
undermine his claim that he was a seeker of historical truth rather than a
Hitler worshipper when, at a weary moment, he mistakenly addressed the judge
as Mein Fuhrer.
Irving had gone to the high court in London claiming that he was suing
Penguin books and Professor Deborah Lipstadt to defend free speech and the
right of historians to dissent from the mainstream view about the Holocaust.
In fact, money and rehabilitating his foundering career may have been
Irving's real motive for suing.
The Guardian has established that Irving was in huge financial difficulty
before the trial. He had taken out five mortgages on his flat off Grosvenor
Square in London worth pounds 750,000. Records lodged with the land registry
show that two of his creditors had filed bankruptcy petitions against him,
which were not followed up.
For Irving, 62, this also was a vanity libel trial, a chance to use the high
court as a platform for his extreme views. Increasingly, he had been
marginalised from the mainstream and confined to fringe neo-Nazi audiences.
Before the verdict, Irving told the Guardian that whatever the outcome: 'My
reputation as a historian has been greatly enhanced.' He took pride from
holding his own in court without the help of a defence barrister.
But a once glittering writing career, from which he earned up to pounds
100,000 a year, was in severe decline. The doors of reputable publishing
houses were closed to him as concerns about his integrity grew more acute.
In spring 1996, his American publisher, St Martin's Press, pulled out of a
deal to publish his biography of Goebbels. That autumn, three years after
the publication of Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust; the
growing assault on truth and memory, he issued a writ for libel. Irving saw
her book and its charge that he was a Holocaust denier as the climax of an
international, Jewish-inspired and long-running conspiracy against him that
threatened his livelihood.
Lipstadt, 53, professor of Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory university
in Atlanta, Georgia, was determined to fight the case: 'It became a personal
quest for the preservation of truth and memory.'
Irving's defeat was far from a foregone conclusion. The burden was on
Penguin books and Lipstadt to prove their charges that Irving had wilfully
distorted history to suit his fascist views.
Their counsel, Richard Rampton QC, staked out the uncompromising ground on
which they would stand or fall on the first day. 'Mr Irving calls himself a
histo rian. The truth is, however, that he is not a historian at all, but a
falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar.'
The decision by Penguin and Lipstadt to plead justification, namely that the
charges against Irving in her book were true, was not only a vastly
expensive business but also a mammoth academic task.
Four years of research unearthed 30 examples of falsifications of history by
Irving. It was the sheer weight of these and the consistent pattern they
formed that won the day for Penguin and Lipstadt.
The method behind Irving's deceptions were complex, the effects significant.
The defence spent pounds 80,000 on a 700-page report on Irving's historical
methods from Richard Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge
university and an expert on the writing of history. Prof Evans, who was paid
pounds 750 a day, and two PhD students spent two years combing through
Irving's work. His report, which was submitted to the judge, shows his shock
at the scale of deceptions he found: 'Penetrating beneath the confident
surface of his prose quickly revealed a mass of distortion and manipulation
. . . so tangled that detailing it sometimes took up many more words than
Irving's original account.
'A similar knotted web of distortions, suppressions and manipulations become
evident in every single instance which we examined.
'I was not prepared for the sheer depths of duplicity which I encountered in
Irving's treatment of the historical sources, nor for the way in which this
dishonesty permeated his entire written and spoken output.'
Both sides agreed to dispense with a jury because of the complexity of the
evidence, leaving the judge, Charles Gray, adjudicating over one of the most
emotive trials in memory.
The first sign of David Irving's Hitler worship came early, his twin brother
Nicholas revealed. Recalling an incident in 1944 after a German bombing raid
on Essex, he told an interviewer: 'We were only six years old, it was 1944.
There were doodlebugs, windows were blown out and houses had been damaged.
'Suddenly, David said: 'We have to say something.' So he went up to them,
did a Nazi salute and said 'Heil Hitler'.'
Irving dropped out of a science degree after his first book, The Destruction
of Dresden, was published in 1963. His lack of formal training as a
historian did not stop him writing 30 books.
The first clear sign that his apparent quest for historical truth seemed to
be hiding an attempt to rehabilitate Hitler came in his 1977 bestseller,
Hitler's war.
In the book Irving claimed Hitler had not ordered the extermination of the
Jews and had even intervened to stop the murder of Jews. This, said Irving,
was based on documents detailing communications between top German military
leaders. The court heard that one document referred to an order not to
liquidate one trainload of 1,000 Jews sent from Germany to Latvia in
November 1941.
Irving, through mistranslating the document, had falsely portrayed it as an
order from Hitler to halt all such killings.
Before the trial, Irving claimed that the shooting of up to 1,500,000 Jews
on Germany's eastern border with Russia, was not systematic but a series of
random acts of which Hitler was unaware. During the trial, evidence was
produced which forced Irving to concede Hitler had indeed sanctioned them.
One such piece of evidence was an order on August 1 1941 to a mobile killing
unit, the Einsatzgruppen, which said Hitler would be getting continuous
reports about their shootings.
This evidence had been known to Irving since 1982. A copy of the order was
contained in a book found in Irving's study, in which he had written notes
in the margin, suggesting he had read it. Gas chambers
Irving later admitted that a report in December 1942 detailing the execution
of 363,211 Jews in South Russia, Ukraine and Bialystok 'was in all
probability shown to Hitler.'
For the second edition of Hitler's War in 1991, Irving had expunged all
references to the Holocaust.
Irving's position in court was that the Nazis may have killed between 1m-4m
people, but that it was not systematic and did not involve gas chambers. He
posed as a thoughtful intellectual, burrowing away with original source
documents to try to seek the truth about the Holocaust.
But a series of viciously anti-semitic speeches he had made to neo-Nazi
audiences, which suggested he had denied the Holocaust, put paid to that
image.
The judge heard extracts from a 1991 speech given by Irving in Calgary,
Canada, in which he rubbished the idea that the Auschwitz camp existed to
murder Jews. 'It's baloney. It's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it
was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large
numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest
of the baloney? Tasteless. I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women
died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever
died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
'Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz
survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past,
which is biologically very odd to say the least. I'm going to form an
association of Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other
liars, or the ASSHOLS.'
This trial turned on the death camp at Auschwitz. Despite evidence to the
contrary, Irving clung to his view it was no more than a 'brutal slave
labour camp'.
The court heard how Irving misinterpreted documents involving the testimony
of an Auschwitz survivor at the Nuremburg trials, a French woman called
Marie-Claude Vaillant Couturier.
Irving twisted the private diaries of Judge Francis Biddle, who presided
over the trial where Vaillant Couturier testified, to try to rubbish her
evidence.
In a speech, Irving claimed that Biddle's notes of the trial, which he
unearthed in an American university library, showed he disbelieved her
evidence.
Irving told an audience that Biddle wrote: 'I don't believe a word of what
she's saying, I think she's a bloody liar.'
Vaillant Couturier's evidence had set out the horror of the death camp. She
had been a member of the French national assembly and was sent to Auschwitz
in 1943. There she testified to seeing beatings, forced sterilisations and
castrations and gas chambers.
In fact, Biddle doubted only one small section of her testimony. According
to Irving's own notes of the judge's diary, Biddle records her as saying:
'House of prostitution for SS selected young women as they were washing for
maids. All camps used the same system.'. After this remark, Biddle, in
brackets writes, 'this I doubt', namely that the same system was used at
every SS camp.
Irving dismissed the witnesses to systematic extermination at Auschwitz as
wrong or lying. He claimed 100,000 people had died there, the same number as
at Dresden, and that was through disease, overwork and some shootings.
Irving's revisionist views on Auschwitz were prompted by a report written by
American extremist Frederick Leuchter in 1989. In the report Leuchter
claimed that samples of concrete taken from the surviving walls at
Auschwitz's gas chambers contained quantities of hydrogen cyanide that were
too low to kill human beings, and thus suggested the chambers were for
delousing.
But the truth was quite the reverse. The real amount of hydrogen cyanide
needed to kill humans is 22 times lower than that needed to kill lice.
Irving wrote the foreword to the Leuchter report. During the trial he was
forced to admit it was riddled with errors.
In court, Irving rejected the label of being a Holocaust denier, saying he
did not question that it had happened, but merely queried the 'means, the
scale, the dates and other minutiae.'
The court heard evidence that Irving was an anti-semite and racist. He
displayed his prejudice in front of his young daughter, singing the ditty:
'I am a baby Aryan/Not Jewish or sectarian/ I have no plans to marry an/Ape
or Rastafarian.'
Irving consorted with the far right, addressing meetings of the
Hitler-worshipping British National Party, the German neo-Nazi DVU party and
extreme right National Alliance in the US.
Germany got so fed up with Irving that it eventually banned him from
entering, as did Canada and Australia.
Perhaps the biggest insight into his deeper motivation comes not from the
libel case, but from the opening line of his introduction to the new edition
of Hitler's War, posted on his website: 'To historians is granted a talent
that even the gods are denied - to alter what has already happened.' Audio
report from Vikram Dodd at the high court on the Guardian network at
www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving
Irving: consigned to history as a racist liar
VIKRAM DODD
04/12/2000
The Guardian
The author David Irving falsified history to exonerate Adolf Hitler, driven
by anti-Semitism and his own pro-Nazi views, the high court ruled yesterday.
In a devastating judgment, Mr Justice Charles Gray ruled that a book which
branded Irving a Holocaust denier was justified in its charges. The defeat
left his reputation as a historian utterly destroyed, and the author of the
bestseller, Hitler's War, facing bankruptcy and the loss of his Mayfair flat.
Irving, 62, had sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers,
Penguin books, for libel.
Penguin books and Professor Lipstadt ran up pounds 2.5m in legal and
research costs to prove Irving had persistently and deliberately
misrepresented and twisted historical evidence to suit his ideology.
Lawyers for Penguin plan to have bailiffs seize Irving's central London
flat, worth pounds 750,000, within three months to try to recover their
costs, according to defence sources.
The Guardian has established that even before yesterday's verdict, Irving
was in financial trouble having taken out five mortgages on his flat,
according to land registry records.
To a packed court, Mr Justice Gray delivered a verdict that excoriated
Irving as a man and a historian. Irving had increased his political activity
over the last 15 years, addressing far right audiences in the US, Germany,
Canada and the New World, the judge said. 'The content of his speeches and
interviews often displays a distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias. He
makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime which
tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities which they
inflicted on the Jews.
'He is content to mix with neo-fascists and appears to share many of their
racist and anti-Semitic prejudices.
'The picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his
extra-curricular activities reveals him to be a rightwing pro-Nazi polemicist.
'In my view, the defendants have established that Irving has a political
agenda. It is one which, it is legitimate to infer, disposes him, where he
deems it necessary, to manipulate the historical record in order to make it
conform with his political beliefs.'
Irving had denied all the charges in Professor Lipstadt's book. The judge
found: 'Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and
deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence; that for
the same reasons he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable
light, principally in relation to his attitude towards, and responsibility
for, the treatment of the Jews.'
Mr Justice Gray ruled that the author was 'an active Holocaust denier; that
he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with rightwing
extremists who promote neo-Nazism'.
The 32-day trial over Professor Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust:
the growing assault on truth and memory, was one of the most emotive for a
generation. In court, Irving had denied millions of Jews were exterminated
in gas chambers, such as Auschwitz.
'It is my conclusion that no objective, fair-minded historian would have
serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that
they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of
Jews,' the judge ruled.
Irving described the verdict as 'firstly, indescribable, and secondly,
perverse.' The judgment was 'understandable' given the judge's being 'an
up-and-coming member of the establishment', he added.
Explaining his defeat, he said: 'I suppose it is my own fault for having
explained myself inadequately clearly.'
Last night he added: 'My own feelings about race are precisely the same as
95% of the people of my generation. That is all I will say. If the British
soldiers on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could look forward to the end of
the century and see what England has become, they would not have bothered to
advance another 40 yards up the beach.'
Asked if he had sufficient funds to cover the massive costs of his defeat he
answered 'no.'
Most of his donors came from abroad, but Irving denied that his money had
come from fellow Nazi sympathisers.
He said 4,000 supporters, the bulk from the US, had sent him varying
amounts. One American had handed him Dollars 50,000 cash in a brown paper
bag at Amsterdam airport, Irving said.
After the verdict Deborah Lipstadt told a news conference that Irving had
'done a lot of evil things'. She added: 'The way he denigrated survivors and
survivors' testimony in the courtroom was horrible.'
The academic accused Irving of 'perversion' for not merely denying the
Holocaust but for 'dancing on the graves' of its victims.
Almost in tears after a four-year battle, she said: 'Soon there won't be
people to tell the story in the first person singular and it'll be easier to
deny.'
Anthony Forbes-Watson, head of Penguin books UK, said it was unlikely all
costs would be recovered: 'Sometimes principles override financial
considerations. How can you be a loss-maker when you win a case on such
overwhelming grounds as these?'
Israel's ambassador to the UK, Dror Zeigerman, who sat in court to hear the
result, said: 'The lesson for the new generation - my generation - is that
we have to continue the struggle. We cannot give up against these people who
raise their voices, like Irving.'
Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, the son of a Holocaust survivor and a spokesman
for the Re form Synagogues of Great Britain, said: 'It is a victory for 6m
voices that cannot speak for themselves. But even more important for the
long-term consequences, it is a defeat for the Holocaust denial industry and
the bigotry that lies behind it.'
Mr Justice Gray refused Irving leave to appeal, but Irving said in court
that he intended to do so. Disgrace of Irving, pages 4-6 Jonathan Freedland,
page 21 Leader comment, page 23 Special report on the Irving case on the
Guardian network at www.newsunlimited.co.uk/irving
Truth's sheer weight : Irving was the deniers' best shot
04/12/2000
The Guardian
David Irving was the Holocaust deniers' best shot. However discredited he
has long been among professional historians, he puts on a good show of his
Nazi learning. He may even have deserved the praise as a military specialist
bestowed on him by Mr Justice Gray yesterday as the sucker punch before his
devastating depiction of Irving as a racist, anti-semite and - this was the
nub of the case - a deliberate falsifier of the evidence.
The Holocaust has been paraded through the law courts before, as if the
destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis were like some recidivist,
forever to be called back before the bench. Long court cases, involving much
of the Irving 'evidence' have unfolded in Canada, in France and here too.
Irving's suit echoed the libel action brought by Wladislav Dering in the
early 60s, later written up by Leon Uris in his novel QBVII. But Irving is
the best of this bunch, the 'face' for those purulent haters behind the
websites and the seamy pamphlets. The deniers will not give up. Irving
demonstrated his intellectual disreputability by claiming to have learnt
nothing, despite that stupendous parade of evidence. Neither accumulating
scholarship nor judicial decisions will weaken an idea as fixed as this one.
But never again will the deniers' claims to standing have even the sliver of
credibility that attached to Irving before he took action against Professor
Lipstadt.
Yet there is no point pretending this verdict is some vindication of English
court procedure let alone libel law. A few well-chosen hard words from a
judge guarantees little by way of wisdom from his colleagues on the bench in
future. The high court has established no claim to epistemological
superiority: it was the convincing evidence presented in Mr Justice Gray's
court that made his con clusion right. Besides, the English law of
defamation remains an ass. The defendants in Irving's action had to scramble
to prove the truth of large historical contentions. As for 'reputation',
Professor Lipstadt's imputations against Irving, true or false, would have
lowered the recognition he enjoyed before the trial as a Nazi sympathiser
and Jew-hater not a jot. The judge in this case won admirers but the absence
of a jury still raises hard questions about our alleged incapacity to assess
evidence and ascertain truth. 'Our' as in us: would ordinary people
empanelled in a jury really have found it impossible to see through David
Irving?
For is not the most compelling lesson of this marathon legal affair that
truth is no shining city on a hill. It has to be worked at; the credibility
of those who claim to express it is critical. Even a casual reader of the
case reports could quickly see how painstaking genuine historical
scholarship is; it builds detail upon detail, avoiding casual inference and
thin deduction. Eventually, a plausible narrative is pieced together but
even then it has to withstand the slings and arrows of competitive scholars.
And the Holocaust is now hot history. Due, in part, to the persistence of
the deniers, academic effort has been redoubled. Among the many Irving
assertions to be comprehensively demolished was the suggestion that thought
police prevent open challenge to received historical wisdom. It is precisely
because of the historians' efforts from the early 50s on that there is now
no room for doubt, despite the false trails and the lacunae left by a Nazi
bureaucracy as assiduous about destroying the signs of its crimes as
realising the final solution. Other jurisdictions make denying the Holocaust
a crime. After this case, we can rely on empiricism and the sheer weight of
evidence.
Holocaust libel case is lesson for Germany: press
04/12/2000
Agence France-Presse
LONDON, April 12 (AFP) - The crushing court defeat of British revisionist
historian David Irving is a victory for free speech and a lesson for
Germany, where denial of the Holocaust is a crime, British papers said
Wednesday.
Irving, who claims that Jews were not systematically exterminated by Nazi
Germany during World War II, Tuesday lost a libel case he had brought
against a US academic, Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher Penguin.
He sued over a 1994 book in which she accused him of distorting statistics
and documents to suit his own ideological purposes and to reach historically
untenable conclusions.
But judge Charles Gray concluded Irving was "an active Holocaust denier" who
was "anti-Semitic and racist" and "associates with right- wing extremists
who promote neo-Nazism."
The verdict in the High Court in London, Irving's chequered career and the
background to the case dominated Wednesday's papers, many of which devoted
at least three pages, plus comment and editorials, to the subject.
In editorials, The Times and the Daily Telegraph both said that freedom of
speech meant Irving was allowed to expound his opinions.
"Such tolerance is the mark of a self-confident society," the conservative
Telegraph noted. Prosecution for a statutory crime of denial "would have
sent out illiberal signals."
But it also meant that his arguments could be publicly and comprehensively
demolished in court for all to see, they pointed out.
"The case has indeed been a victory for free speech, and truth as well: a
lesson to be pondered in Germany where Holocaust denial is a crime,"
remarked The Times.
It added: "A British court has produced a more sophisticated and effective
cross-examination of Holocaust denial than a ban could ever provide."
The Guardian said it was Irving's reputation as a historian that had been
shattered. From being the Holocaust deniers' "best shot," he was now shown
to be a "deliberate falsifier of the evidence."
"Never again will the deniers' claims to standing have even the sliver of
credibility that attached to Irving before he took action against Professor
Lipstadt."
The Independent said that if Irving had managed to convince the judge that
he was a reputable historian only seeking to adjust the death toll
downwards, it would have been hailed as a victory for those who would deny
the Holocaust altogether.
"The crowning irony is that David Irving tried to use the notoriously
restrictive British libel law to choke off critical examination of his own
views in the name of his right to criticise the work of others."
The legal battle, in which Lipstadt and Penguin denied libel and pleaded
justification, was the first concerning revisionism to come before a British
court.
Irving, who lives in London and represented himself throughout the 32-day
hearing, described the ruling as "perverse" and has said he will appeal.
U.S. Scholar Is Victorious In Holocaust Libel Trial; Historian's View on
Hitler Rebuked in London Court
T. R. Reid
Washington Post Foreign Service
04/12/2000
The Washington Post
LONDON, April 11 -- David Irving, a British historian who sought to
chronicle World War II from Adolf Hitler's point of view, lost his long
libel battle today as a High Court judge ruled he had "deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" when he wrote that the
Nazi leader was unaware of the Holocaust.
In a lengthy opinion, Justice Charles Gray said that American scholar
Deborah Lipstadt was "substantially justified" in describing Irving as "one
of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial."
Lipstadt--a professor of Jewish studies at Emory University who coined the
term "Holocaust denial"--has charged that Irving is a "Hitler partisan . . .
a racist, and an antisemite" who provided a "crucial degree of
respectability" to neo-Nazis and others seeking to deny the Nazi effort to
exterminate Europe's Jews. Gray ruled today that each element of Lipstadt's
description was "substantially accurate."
A prolific author who was once praised for his research by leading
historians, Irving is now shunned by his former publishers. He sued Lipstadt
and her publisher under Britain's plaintiff-friendly libel laws in an
attempt to restore his academic reputation; instead, he now stands
humiliated by the verdict and liable for the defendants' court costs, about
$3 million. "There's no way I can pay the costs, because I have no money,"
he said today.
Standing alone at a bus stop in the rain after hearing the verdict, Irving,
62, said he was "defeated but unbowed." "No publisher will touch me after
this," he said, adding that he intends to publish his own books from now on.
"I am higher-profile now than I was" before the trial, he went on, "and I
think the negative sign in front of the profile will be erased over time."
Lipstadt, 52, said after the verdict that she had challenged Irving because
"the truth has to be kept alive."
"As [Holocaust] survivors die off and there are fewer and fewer
eyewitnesses," Lipstadt said tearfully, "there won't be people to tell the
story in the first person, and it will be easier to deny it."
This libel case was initially expected to put the Holocaust itself on trial,
but Irving told the court in his opening statement that "no person . . . can
deny that the tragedy actually happened." So the courtroom battle dealt
mainly with the reasons why Irving and his once respected books are now so
widely vilified. Irving claimed he was the victim of an "international
conspiracy" led by Lipstadt because he "dared to write history that
challenged the politically correct point of view." Irving has sought to show
that the number of Jews who died in Nazi hands was "far smaller" than the
widely accepted figure of 6 million and that "there was no industry-scale
gassing of Jews."
Gray said in his ruling that "as a military historian, Irving has much to
commend him." But after listening to testimony from some of the world's
leading historians, Gray said, he concluded that Irving's treatment of
Hitler and his role in the Holocaust could "not be called history."
Reading his opinion in a packed courtroom this morning--with several
Holocaust survivors in attendance--the bewigged judge said Irving's
sympathetic portrayal of Hitler in such books as "Hitler's War" in 1977
amounts to "distortion and manipulation."
"He has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, principally in
relation to his attitude toward and responsibility for the treatment of the
Jews," Gray declared.
The judge said Irving overstated any evidence that might suggest Hitler was
innocent of the slaughter and ignored documents or testimony that
demonstrated the dictator's involvement in the "Final Solution"--the Nazi
euphemism for the destruction of the Jews. "This falsification of the
historical record was deliberate," Gray said, "motivated by a desire to
present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs."
The judge dug deeply into Irving's contention that Jews were not killed in
gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp, in Nazi-occupied Poland. "In
common I suspect with most other people," Gray said, "I had supposed the
evidence of mass extermination of Jews in the gas chambers at Auschwitz was
compelling. I have, however, set aside this preconception."
While some of the evidence on Auschwitz is "variable," the judge said, a
review of documents, photographs and eyewitness testimony led him to
conclude that "no objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause
to doubt that . . . gas chambers at Auschwitz . . . operated on a
substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews."
Irving asked the judge for "leave to appeal," but permission was denied on
grounds that the key issues in the case were all factual and therefore not
matters of law for an appellate court. Without the trial judge's permission
to appeal, Irving will find it nearly impossible to take the case to a
higher court here.
Lipstadt's 1993 book, "Denying the Holocaust," which contains sharp attacks
on Irving and his work, has been printed around the world. Publication of a
Penguin Books edition here gave Irving the opportunity he had sought to sue
Lipstadt in a British court. In a reverse of the American system, libel law
here forces the defendant to prove the truth of any challenged statement,
but even the legal presumptions in his favor failed to win the day for Irving.
"David Irving's career as a historian is over," said a statement from the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based organization representing Nazi
victims. "Today's decision definitely places Irving . . . as a leading
apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most heinous crime in human
history."
Irving said he will continue to present his views on his Web site. Lipstadt
said this is no surprise to her. "There will always be haters," she said
after the verdict. "The neo-Nazis will read this [verdict], and they'll say,
'Yech.' They'll just dismiss it.
"This nightmare is not over," she added. "You just have to fight each new
battle."
Let's close the book: David Irving has been demolished. Now it is time to
give Holocaust victims and survivors some peace
04/12/2000
The Guardian
A dark, unwanted episode has reached a good and just end. David Irving
wanted Britain's high court to rescue his reputation: instead it trashed it.
He went in seeking vindication for his claim that the Holocaust never
happened, that Adolf Hitler was not the murderer of the Jews but their
friend. He walked out yesterday - through a back entrance, his jacket pelted
with eggs - branded a racist and an anti-semite, a Hitler apologist and a
'pro-Nazi polemicist.' Those were not the words of his accusers, but the
voice of British law, in the form of the judge, Charles Gray. From now on,
it is a legally-established fact that a writer who once won plaudits for his
military histories distorted the facts of the Holocaust to fit his
ideological prejudices. From now on, he shall wear the scarlet letter of
shame, branded a bigot and a cheat. A bad man is finished.
Now he faces bankruptcy; his home may be seized to pay back the pounds 2m
the defence spent fighting him. And, lest we be fooled by Irving's
insistence that he was the penniless David battling the mighty Goliath of
world Jewry, let's remember who brought this case. It was Irving who sued
the American academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin Books -
not the other way around. Short of apologising on bended knee to a Nazi
sympathiser, Lipstadt had no choice but to defend herself in court. She was
not, as Irving argued, the enemy of free speech: on the contrary, it was he
who tried to use Britain's absurd libel laws to suppress his critics. He
wanted Lipstadt gagged; instead he has brought ruin upon himself.
But much more than the fate of David Irving was decided yesterday. The high
court also drove a stake through the heart of 'revisionism' -the right-wing
credo which says the Jews have mounted a con-trick on the rest of humanity
by inventing a tragedy. Gray has nailed that lie. When he read his judgment
to a packed and hushed Court 36 yesterday, he began by explaining that he
could not rule on 'what actually happened during the Nazi regime'. He would
leave that to the historians. But, within minutes, Gray was issuing
declaration after declaration, demolishing Irving and his Holocaust-denying
chums. In a typical, devastating sentence, the judge ruled 'that no
objective, fair-minded historian would. . . doubt that there were gas
chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to
kill hundreds of thousands of Jews'. His theories in shreds, Irving himself
shrank before our eyes: a windbag whose air was slowly seeping away.
Gray's verdict matters not just to the victims of the Shoah and their
families. It matters to all of us. For what became clear as this case
unfolded was that Holocaust revisionism is an assault not only on Jews but
on history itself - the very business of understanding the past. Irving
argued that we could not trust eye-witness testimony (both survivors and
Nazis had made it all up) and that any document that pointed at the
systematic destruction of European Jewry was bound to be a forgery. With
that as his method, Irving sought to sweep away the foundations of history
and even of justice: for if we cannot believe the evidence of tens of
thousands of witnesses, how can we believe anything? If Irving had won
yesterday, the ground beneath our feet would have begun to feel shaky. The
court would have declared that we, like David Irving, live in a topsy-turvy
world where nothing can ever be known. That's why this verdict is not a
victory for the defence; it is a victory for memory.
Now what? There will be a temptation to shout this ruling from the rooftops.
For the last two decades, particularly in the US, Jews have been oddly
defensive about the Shoah: they have constructed memorials and museums, even
made films like Schindler's List, in part to see off the deniers. They have
wanted to gather the evidence that might silence the Irvings. Yesterday's
verdict may bring release from that defensive crouch: now we can tell our
story our way, happy that our accusers have been defeated in a venue
respected around the world.
I can see that happening, and yet I hope it does not. I would like the
Jewish world to have a different, less expected response to this result. I
would like to see a pause and even, frankly, a rest: for it's time we gave
the victims and survivors of the Holocaust some peace.
Thanks to jet travel I began yesterday morning, four hours before the
verdict, in Prague. (Along with several Guardian colleagues, I was in the
city for a weekend literary festival sponsored by the paper.) It made an
eerily appropriate ante-room for Court 36. For what used to be
Czechoslovakia once contained nearly 260,000 Jews; now only three or four
thousand are left. Prague itself is filled with reminders of the Nazi
effort. Take the Jewish Museum, a fine building brimming with holy books and
religious artefacts. Visitors snake around the display cases, their cameras
clicking - most of them unaware that the curators of this exhibition were
the men of the Third Reich: Hitler had designated Prague as the site for a
future Museum of the Extinct Jewish People. He wanted future tourists to see
what strange creatures the Nazis had so bravely removed from the planet. The
SS began bringing to Prague Judaica from destroyed synagogues and
communities all over the region.
Now, though, one has the queasy feeling that Hitler's macabre plan has come
unexpectedly true. Tourists do indeed come to gaze at Jewish prayer books in
glass cases, to marvel at the striking, lop-sided tombstones of Prague's
Jewish cemetery, assembled like a mouthful of jagged teeth. In the Prague
museum, Jews are like butterflies: rare and exotic - catalogued and pressed
under glass. An entire cottage industry has built up, trading in a
fascination not with Jewish life, but Jewish death.
Jews cannot blame this process on others. American Jewry wanted a Holocaust
museum in Washington DC, just as British Jews worked hard to get the
Holocaust into the national curriculum. But several committed, thoughtful
Jews are beginning to wonder if it isn't time to call a halt. In his
landmark book, the Holocaust in American Life, Peter Novick calls on his
community to find something else to place at the centre of their identity.
He has pleaded for an end to the commercialisation and 'sacralization' of
the Shoah which has turned it into a kitschy, quasi-mystical event. At the
Prague festival William Styron - whose novel, Sophie's Choice, came before
the current Holocaust boom - suggested now might be the time for some
'quiet'. Not because the slaughter is a holy event which cannot be discussed
by mere mortals, but because our collective interest in it is getting
unhealthy.
This would be a fine riposte to Irving, who likes to quip that the Holocaust
is 'the only interesting thing that has ever happened to the Jews'. To
follow the advice of Novick, Styron and others, would be to defy Hitler's
plan for the Jews. He wanted to make us a dead people: it is time to prove
we still live.
No libel found in Holocaust suit
Bert Roughton Jr.
04/12/2000
The Atlanta Constitution
Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt said Tuesday she had no
illusions her resounding court victory over maverick historical writer David
Irving will have much influence with Holocaust deniers and other extremists.
"But that's not who I'm writing for," Lipstadt told a packed news conference
at a London hotel after the verdict was delivered. "It's to convince the
people who might be influenced by people like David Irving."
Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books won a nearly complete victory over
Irving, who had sued them alleging libel for characterizations of him in
"Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory."
In her 1994 book, Lipstadt described Irving as a dangerous leader of the
movement to minimize the Holocaust. She portrayed him as a false academic
who manipulates history to support his extremist political views. During the
trial, her attorneys described Irving as dishonest and deeply anti-Semitic.
The judge ruled this portrayal, while damaging to Irving, was substantiated
by evidence presented during the three-month trial.
While it was argued that the case did not amount to a test of the accuracy
of the traditional account of the Holocaust, the trial turned on historical
evidence and the testimony of experts.
By demonstrating that the weight of historical record overwhelmingly
supports accepted understanding of the Holocaust, Lipstadt's lawyers showed
that Irving's misrepresentations in books and speeches must have been
deliberate.
In a detailed, 66-page ruling, Justice Charles Gray assailed Irving for his
30-year record of attacking long-held accounts of the Holocaust, which
Irving often has dismissed as fiction.
Gray said the evidence showed that Irving "persistently and deliberately
manipulated historical evidence" and that he portrayed Nazi leader Adolf
Hitler in a favorable light that is unsupportable by the historical record.
"The picture of Irving which emerges from the evidence of his
extra-curricular activities revealed him to be a right-wing pro-Nazi
polemicist," said Gray, who read much of his ruling in a calm, even voice.
"It appears to me to be incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a
Holocaust denier.
"Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and
asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent occasions
and sometimes in the most offensive terms," said the judge, wearing a
periwig and robes.
The trial featured the testimony of several highly respected historians, who
presented reams of documentation about the Nazi campaign to exterminate the
Jews.
"It is my conclusion that no objective, fair-minded historian would have
serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that
they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of
Jews," Gray said.
Lipstadt said her victory might help stem the tide of historical revision at
a time when the ranks of people who remember the Holocaust are dwindling.
"Soon there won't be people to tell the story in the first-person singular,"
she said. "That's why I think today's judgment is so important."
"Whatever steam they may have built up, I hope was dissipated by this
judgment," she said.
Irving contended Lipstadt's portrayal was false and cost him his lucrative
career as a historical writer and lecturer. He also said he has been exposed
to scorn and perhaps personal danger because of her work.
Irving depicted himself as an unconventional researcher who is simply
challenging conventional wisdom. Seeing himself as a David battling a
Goliath, Irving has argued that he is the victim of an international Jewish
conspiracy.
Although he waffled somewhat during the trial, Irving maintained for years
that he didn't believe the Nazis killed as many as 6 million Jews in a
systematic extermination effort. However, he said he accepted that the Nazis
were responsible for the deaths of many Jews, maybe a million, most of whom
died from malnutrition, disease or by firing squad.
He contended the scope of the Holocaust has been overblown by Jews seeking
to boost reparations payments from Germany.
Irving sat silently, staring straight ahead, as the judge read the ruling.
He was in shirt-sleeves because he had been hit by an egg as he entered the
courthouse.
Before the ruling, Irving told reporters that he would be a winner
regardless of the outcome. "My reputation is bound to be enhanced because of
my ability to stand up to the experts --- to take them all on
single-handed," he said.
Irving's decision to sue turned out to be catastrophic for him, however. Not
only did Gray say that the evidence supported the book's depiction of
Irving, he also said it is likely that the English author will be asked to
pay $3.2 million in court costs.
Gray also rejected Irving's request for an appeal.
During her news conference, Lipstadt singled out Emory University for
standing by her through the five-year ordeal. "Emory has been exceptionally
supportive in many ways," she said.
Emory President William M. Chace said the university "celebrates Deborah
Lipstadt's victory in this case as a victory for free inquiry."
The American Jewish Committee also applauded the verdict. Members of the
Atlanta chapter were in the courtroom throughout the trial.
"We were witnesses to the truth, lending our emotional support to Dr.
Deborah Lipstadt, a revered member of our Atlanta community," said Sherry
Frank, the committee's Southeast area director. "David Irving's distortion
of historical facts and despicable hatred of Jews received full light of
inspection in this courtroom. Justice, truth and free speech prevail."
Lipstadt never testified during the trial, a course advised by her
attorneys. "They thought the book spoke for itself," she said.
While she believes the case was an important moment in her struggle against
Holocaust deniers, she said it was a conflict she would happily have avoided.
"This has wreaked havoc on my life," she said. "There are books I haven't
written, articles I haven't written and students I've neglected."
But she said it was worth it.
"The most moving moment in the trial was when I walked out of the court and
was enveloped by Holocaust survivors," she said, nearly breaking into tears.
"Survivors who said, 'Thank you.' "
The Roots of Holocaust Denial
By Ron Rosenbaum
04/12/2000
The Wall Street Journal
British historian David Irving gained wide publicity by filing a libel suit
against American author Deborah Lipstadt, who in a 1994 book described him
as a Holocaust denier. The verdict against Mr. Irving yesterday in London
was welcome -- but unlikely, alas, to put an end to the pernicious fantasies
of Holocaust deniers.
So it is perhaps worthwhile to look into the origin of Holocaust denial in
the pattern laid down by the first Holocaust denier: Adolf Hitler. And to
ask some hard questions of historians who have tried to defend Mr. Irving by
separating his "fact gathering" from his historical "interpretation."
Perhaps the first recorded instance of Holocaust denial can be found in a
passage in the massive compilation of Hitler's wartime "Table Talk," the
stenographic record of his after-dinner conversations in the command bunker
on the Eastern front in the early years of the war. On Oct. 24, 1941,
Hitler's special guests were his two chief partners in the execution of the
Final Solution, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and Reinhard Heydrich, the
man in direct charge of the genocide to come.
Already their hands were drenched in blood from the mass murders of Jews
committed by the roving special-action squads (Einsatzgruppen). Nonetheless,
in an obviously staged performance, Hitler said this: "From the rostrum of
the Reichstag [in 1939] I prophesied to Jewry that, in the event of war's
proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of
criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War
and now already hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody tell me that all the
same we can't park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who's worrying about
our troops? It's not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumor attributes to
us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing."
At that moment, when Hitler puts on record the lie that extermination is
just a "rumor," Holocaust denial was born. (Note, too, the perverse logic
that will be adopted by most subsequent Holocaust deniers: It didn't happen,
and if it did happen, the Jews deserved it.) Denial was not invented by
postwar kooks and anti-Semites. It was built into the very process of the
Holocaust. Hitler never allowed himself to be seen near a death camp; never,
so far as we know, put his signature on a genocide order.
Upon these absences, Hitler's cloak of denial, Mr. Irving built his own
career of denial. He began, in his first book on the question, by arguing
that the absence of a written Hitler order for extermination meant that
Hitler was innocent or not personally involved. He later argued that the
absence of a written order indicated it didn't happen at all.
In Mr. Irving's view, he told me in a 1994 interview, a few hundred thousand
Jews may have died from typhus, hunger and brutal conditions in places like
Auschwitz, along with some sporadic unorganized killing. But, he said, no
one was gassed, because the gas chambers were a myth. To back up this claim
Mr. Irving cited Fred Leuchter's "scientific" proof (since definitively
discredited) that cyanide gas was not to be found at Auschwitz. Later Mr.
Irving phrased his view of the gas chambers at Auschwitz this way: "More
people died in the back of Teddy Kennedy's car."
Denial at the top of the Nazi chain of command was echoed by denial all the
way down. Yes, the Nazis kept meticulous records of their train shipments of
Jews to the camps. But the documents maintain the fiction that these were
"work camps." So thorough was the process of denial that Nazi documents make
no reference to the gassing apparatus, except by coded euphemism.
A dramatic example of this was brought to light in Errol Morris's "Mr.
Death," the recent documentary about Fred Leutcher, the "scientist" and
Holocaust denier. In the film, Auschwitz historian Robert Jan van Pelt
unearths a document from the camp's SS archives in which a functionary is
reprimanded for actually using the word for gas chamber in requisitioning
parts for it. Seeing the scrawled snarl of the SS officer at this slip in
the denial process is as chilling and decisive a refutation of denial as a
Hitler signature would have been.
But the facade of denial was extensive enough to license people like David
Irving to dismiss the eyewitness testimony of survivors, guards and even
death camp commandants like Rudolf Hoess of Auschwitz, who all testified to
the killing process, and to claim -- as Mr. Irving did in his recent
biography of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels -- that Auschwitz was not a
death camp but merely "the most brutal of all Himmler's slave labor camps
and the one with the highest mortality rate."
It is Mr. Irving's biography of Goebbels and its reception by some otherwise
sophisticated historians that is more troubling then the kind of crude
no-gassing denials that were at issue in the London libel trial. Mr.
Irving's approach in the Goebbels book was not Holocaust denial but Hitler
denial. It was the bad Dr. Goebbles who plotted mass murder with Himmler --
underneath the innocent Adolf Hitler's nose, but without his knowledge.
The controversy over the Goebbels book in the U.S. centered on whether the
publisher was right to cancel it. But the shocking aspect of that
controversy was the argument some otherwise responsible historians made to
separate a "good" David Irving, the fact gatherer who has been able to
unearth vast amounts of original documents and eyewitness testimony about
Hitler and his war, from the not-so-good David Irving who may get some of
his interpretations wrong.
This view that Mr. Irving is "good on the facts" has been sharply challenged
by the historian John Lukacs (in "The Hitler of History"), who took the
trouble to examine Mr. Irving's footnotes and produced a scathing critique
of the way Mr. Irving's interpretive agenda infected his presentation of
facts.
Perhaps the London verdict might be an occasion for historians who argue
that you can defend Mr. Irving by separating "fact gathering" from
interpretation to reconsider. To learn the lesson that fact gathering can be
prejudiced by what one is looking for -- and by what one is not looking for.
Can one praise a fact gatherer who somehow has failed to find the facts of
mass murder behind Hitler's pattern of denial? Can we praise historians who
are charmed by Mr. Irving despite that failure? Unlike Mr. Irving himself,
they are not guilty of Holocaust denial. But in their naivete about the
relationship between fact and interpretation, they might fairly be charged
with David Irving denial.
---
Mr. Rosenbaum is author of "Explaining Hitler" (1998) and "The Secret Parts
of Fortune," forthcoming in July, both published by Random House.
Historian Loses Libel Suit on Holocaust View
MARJORIE MILLER
TIMES STAFF WRITER
04/12/2000
Los Angeles Times
LONDON -- Britain's High Court called Hitler biographer David Irving
"anti-Semitic and racist" in a scathing ruling Tuesday that rejected the
libel charges he had brought over claims that he is a Holocaust denier.
Irving had sued U.S. professor Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher,
Penguin UK, for portraying him as someone who falsifies history to suit his
widely dismissed views on Hitler and the Holocaust--including the assertion
that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
The British historian claimed that Lipstadt's book "Denying the Holocaust:
The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory" distorted the truth and damaged his
reputation.
High Court Judge Charles Gray said that Irving not only has denied the
Holocaust but is "a right-wing, pro-Nazi polemicist" who mixes with
neo-fascists.
"Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence," the judge said after
reading for more than two hours from his 334-page decision.
Irving, who represented himself in the case and was pelted with eggs by
protesters on his way into the courtroom, called the ruling "perverse." He
boasted that the trial "undoubtedly has made me one of the best-known
historians in the world."
The ruling was an overwhelming moral victory for the defense, and
particularly so given Britain's tough libel laws.
In the United States, Irving would have been treated as a public figure and
would have had to prove that Lipstadt and Penguin had maligned him with
malicious intent. In Britain, it was up to the defense to prove that their
charges against Irving were true.
The defense brought in some of the top experts on World War II to prove not
that the Holocaust took place--that was a given in its case--but that Irving
had willfully distorted facts. The judge concurred with the majority of the
19 cases it presented in detail during the three-month trial.
"We hoisted him on his own petard," said Lipstadt, professor of modern
Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta. "We tracked his
footnotes and followed his sources."
Jewish leaders hailed the verdict as a significant defeat for hate and
prejudice.
"It is important to show again and again that we will not forget what
happened in the Holocaust," Dror Zeiegerman, the Israeli ambassador to
Britain, said outside the courtroom.
The Israeli government had released the 1,300-page prison memoirs of Nazi
war criminal Adolf Eichmann for use by Lipstadt's legal team.
The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center said the trial had exposed
Irving as "a leading apologist for those who seek to whitewash the most
heinous crime in human history."
In Los Angeles, where Lipstadt, a former UCLA professor, lived for many
years, local Jewish leaders hailed the court's decision. "The ruling
vindicates the scholarship of a true historian while reaffirming David
Irving's status as a falsifier of history and a Nazi sympathizer," said
David A. Lehrer, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Irving argued in his career and in court that Hitler did not mastermind the
execution of Jews during World War II and that the so-called Final Solution
was instead orchestrated by his associate Heinrich Himmler. He calls
Auschwitz a "tourist attraction" built by Poland after the war, and he
asserts that it was logistically impossible for the Nazis to have killed
millions of people.
Mainstream historians accept the estimates that about a million people were
gassed to death at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone.
The judge acknowledged that Irving is an expert in World War II military
history, and he stressed that it wasn't his function to try to determine
what actually happened during the Holocaust. He nonetheless concluded that
the defendants were justified in asserting that Irving had misrepresented
Hitler's views on Jews to try to exonerate the Nazi leader.
"He has done so in some instances by misinterpreting and mistranslating
documents and in other instances by omitting documents or parts of them,"
Gray said. The result is a picture of Hitler "at odds with the evidence."
While acknowledging that historians make errors, the judge rejected Irving's
claim that his mistakes were innocent. Gray said they consistently presented
Hitler in "an unwarrantedly favorable light."
He warned Irving that he will have to pay the bulk of the defense's legal
fees, estimated by Penguin at more than $3 million. He said that Irving did
not have grounds for appeal, but added that Irving could contest that
determination.
Irving insisted that the ruling was full of factual errors and that he would
have no difficulty winning an appeal.
Lipstadt responded that Irving is a "judge denier."
She said she felt vindicated after a battle that had taken five years of her
life, and she grew tearful in recounting the thanks she has received from
survivors of the Holocaust.
"There is a finite amount of time for them to be here to tell their story in
the first person," Lipstadt said. When they are gone, "it will be easier to
deny. That is why I wrote the book."
PHOTO: U.S. professor Deborah Lipstadt leaves London court, where she
successfully defended her book that calls David Irving a Holocaust denier.;
; PHOTOGRAPHER: Associated Press; PHOTO: (A2) VICTORY--U.S. professor
Deborah Lipstadt and Holocaust survivor Martin Hecht celebrate in London
after British court rejected libel charges brought against her by Hitler
biographer David Irving. A1; ; PHOTOGRAPHER: Reuters
USA: Israel's Barak hails Holocaust libel ruling.
04/11/2000
Reuters English News Service
WASHINGTON, April 11 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak welcomed
a U.S. professor's court victory on Tuesday in a libel suit which exposed
controversial British historian David Irving as a "Holocaust denier".
In a statement from Washington, where Barak was due to meet U.S. President
Bill Clinton on Middle East peacemaking, the Israeli leader welcomed the
British court's verdict in the name of Israel and the entire Jewish people.
It said Barak had told the professor, Deborah Lipstadt, that her struggle
and victory "are a victory of the free world against the dark forces seeking
to obliterate the memory of the lowest point humanity ever reached".
Irving, who was pelted with eggs as he entered the court, claimed Adolf
Hitler did not mastermind the mass slaughter of Jews and said the German
death camp Auschwitz was little more than a "Disneyland for tourists" built
after World War Two.
Irving brought the action against Penguin Books, a subsidiary of media giant
Pearson Plc, and Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta,
Georgia.
"(Israel) conducts a determined and steadfast struggle against those who try
to deny the Holocaust that brought about the destruction of a third of our
people," the statement said.
In a blistering verdict, Judge Charles Gray slammed Irving as "an active
Holocaust denier...anti-Semitic and racist" who associates with right-wing
extremists who promote neo-Nazism.
###
The Irish Times
Wednesday, April 12, 2000 (Opinion)
Holocaust Denial
An active Holocaust denier, an
anti-Semite and a racist, a man who
associates with right-wing extremists
and promoters of neo-Nazism. The
judgment handed down yesterday by a
London High Court in the libel action,
brought by the historian and author
David Irving against Penguin Books and
an American academic Deborah
Lipstadt, is blunt and to the point. It is
also entirely justified and much to be
welcomed.
Mr Justice Gray, who sat without a jury,
deserves credit for cutting through Mr
Irving's nonsense about freedom of
speech and academic freedom. This was
a case about truth - the truth regarding
the single greatest crime of the 20th
century. Irving has sought for years to
portray himself as a humble seeker after
truth, a lonely knight fighting, as he
would see it, mythology and self-serving
distortions about the Holocaust -
mythology and distortions that were
created, in his view, by Jews.
But Judge Gray, in his damning 300
page judgment, said Irving was indeed a
denier of the Holocaust. He denies the
existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz
(a tourist attraction built by the Poles, he
claims) and asserts that no Jew was
gassed there. He has done so frequently
and in the most offensive terms, said the
judge.
Irving's theories are not the stuff of
irrelevant debate in some rarified
recesses of academe. The man is a hero
to Holocaust revisionists and those who
seek to detach history's assessment of
Adolf Hitler from the reality of what the
Nazis did to their fellow human beings.
Herein lies the poison of Irving's
dumbing down of mankind's collective
memory of the Holocaust. This event,
the systematic, mass murder of some six
million people, most, though not all of
them Jews, is unparalleled in human
history. No regime in recorded history
has set out to wipe from the face of the
earth an entire ethnic group simply
because of its religious belief and
culture. What happened in the famine
(an Irish commentator recently made the
comparison) is entirely different and
more complex than is often allowed by
some commentators.
A true and accurate understanding of the
Holocaust is important because it can
inform us of the need to show respect
and tolerance for minorities, for people
who are different from ourselves. Those
who control our memory of the past
possess a unique opportunity to fashion
our future. If one thinks the truth about
the Holocaust is unimportant, ask a
neoNazi in today's Germany - better still,
ask an asylum seeker cowering in a
hostel, living in terror of the mobs that
regularly attack them.
David Irving richly deserves the
financial ruin now facing him and the
destruction of what little reputation he
had. And it is worth noting what did for
him in the end. It was not argy-bargy on
university campuses, it was not a hail of
rotten eggs and the shouting down of
his message by strident adolescent
voices. It was the clinical, forensic
examination of his credo, a calculated
and methodical destruction of his
untruthful version of history.
==
Irish Times, April 12, 2000 (Opinion)
Irving exposed as a
liar with no interest
in truth
The defeat of the Holocaust denier,
David Irving, in a London libel court
is a victory for truth and
democracy, suggests David
Cesarani
A common misconception about the
libel case brought by David Irving
against the American academic Deborah
Lipstadt is that history was on trial. It
titillated the prurient who like to dabble
in the pornography of Holocaust denial
and appealed to those looking for a
backlash against the Holocaust, to
suggest that the factuality of the
Holocaust was at issue. It never was.
Irving said fatefully in his opening
statement: "This trial is not really about
what happened in the Holocaust, or how
many Jews and other persecuted
minorities were put to death. This court
will, I hope, agree with me when the
time comes that the issue before us is
not what happened, but how I treated it
in my works of history." He was right.
The trial was not about interpretations
of history, or what it is "permissible" to
say. It was not about freedom of speech.
Nor was it even about the past: its true
gravity lay in the present and the future.
The outcome of the trial will not alter
events from 1933 to 1945, but it will
have a profound impact on the defence
of truth and democracy in years to
come.
Irving sued Prof Lipstadt after she
labelled him a Holocaust denier in her
1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, and
placed him in the ranks of those who
manipulate and distort history according
to a political agenda.
This was immensely damaging to his
reputation because, until the early 1990s,
Irving was treated as just a wayward,
right-wing historian who was efficient at
digging up new material about the Third
Reich. His books were respectfully
reviewed in worthy newspapers and his
reputation as an English man of letters
gave him stature in many countries.
No one looked that hard at what he
wrote or, more importantly, how he
worked. Perhaps this was because he
enjoyed the supreme condescension of
the literary and academic establishment,
who seem to have regarded him as little
more than a pleb with a talent for
grubbing around in archives and the
patience to woo the shrivelled widows
of Nazi functionaries who nobody else
wanted to interview.
In her book, Lipstadt only scraped the
carapace of his technique, but the
accusation that he perverted the sources
was enough to provoke him to legal
action. This, in turn, led Lipstadt's
supporters to fund a small army of
researchers, led by a Cambridge
historian, Prof Richard Evans, who for
the first time subjected his oeuvreto
minute examination. The results were
devastating.
The expert reports for the trial, by Profs
Christopher Browning, Robert Jan van
Pelt, Richard Evans and Dr Peter
Longerich, showed he systematically
misrepresented documents in order to
exculpate Hitler of anti-Jewish crimes
and minimise the destruction wreaked
on Europe's Jews.
They demonstrated that he ignored
evidence that the mass murder of Jews
by the Nazis was a systematic campaign
of genocide, that Hitler knew about it,
and that it culminated in the slaughter of
millions of Jews in gas chambers at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This was not a matter of interpretation, a
legitimate activity for historians. Irving
could only reach his conclusions by
wilful misinterpretation. For example,
he claimed Hitler was innocent of the
November 1938 pogrom called
Kristallnacht and that, when he found
out about it, he tried to limit the
destruction of Jewish property.
In support of this claim, Irving cited a
telex by the head of the German police
which, he claimed, ordered his men to
prevent damage to Jewish property. But
Irving neglected to mention that the
property in question was only business
premises: not synagogues or private
dwellings. Nor did Hitler issue
instructions to prevent Jews from being
mistreated or killed.
In another instance, he mistranslated a
telegram from Hitler's headquarters in
November 1941 requiring that a
transport of Jews from Berlin to the East
should not be liquidated as meaning that
no transports of Jews should suffer this
fate. In fact, it clearly referred to one
transport of Jews from Berlin whom
Hitler wanted to spare from the general
massacre so they could serve as
hostages.
But is this mere quibbling over what
happened in the distant past? Another
expert witness, Prof Hajo Funke, a
German political scientist, explained that
Irving's rewriting of the past was music
to the ears of the far right in Germany.
For neoNazis desperate to break the
association between Hitlerism and
horror, Irving's benign portrait of the
F|hrer and denial of the Holocaust was
a step towards political rehabilitation.
Indeed, the trial showed that Irving was
a welcome speaker on far-right
platforms all over the world.
ITS outcome is unlikely to shake the
faith of these true believers. If anything,
it will confirm their paranoid fantasies
about Jewish power. Irving will become
the latest martyr to the world Jewish
conspiracy, to which he referred
throughout the trial as the cause of his
problems. Does this mean it was a waste
of time, energy and money?
Critics of the process may depict it as a
pyrrhic victory, since the trial gave
Irving global coverage. They may say it
offended against notions of free speech
and could provoke a backlash in his
favour.
Yet for the public, the trial has
destroyed Irving's reputation as a writer
who needs to be taken seriously. It has
exposed him as a liar with no genuine
interest in the pursuit of truth. The trial
was not about freedom of speech: it was
about freedom for falsehood. History
was not in question, but the so-called
historian was.
By unmasking the methods of the
deniers, the trial has actually made space
for legitimate research and debate about
the history of the Nazi era. It has shown
the politicians of the far right that they
will never be able to rely on true
scholarship to erase the crimes of the
Third Reich. The world is a little bit
safer for truth and democracy.
David Cesarani is professor of modern
Jewish history at Southampton
University and director of the Wiener
Library, London.
==
Wednesday, April 12, 2000
Irving's brother
changed name to
avoid link
BRITAIN: David John Cawdell Irving
was born in Essex in March 1938. One
of four children, he has a twin brother
who changed his name by deed poll to
avoid the family connection. His
parents, Beryl, a writer and illustrator,
and John, a naval commander who
served in both wars, separated early on
and Irving got to know his father only
towards the end of his life.
The family lived in straitened
circumstances and Irving attended a
minor public school, but did not finish
his degree due to lack of money.
He then embarked on a rugged love
affair with Germany, working for a year
in the Ruhr steelworks, where he rose to
the position of third smelter.
Back in England, he again began a
degree, financing his studies by working
as a nightwatchman and writing articles.
The publication of his first book, about
the Allied air raids on Dresden, was
followed by a score more with another
three still in the pipeline.
Irving claims that envy for his early
success and research methods turned to
malice after Hitler's War - with its claim
that the F|hrer did not know about the
mass killings until 1943 - appeared in
the US in 1977.
In 1961, Irving married the daughter of
a Spanish industrial chemist, who was
fiercely opposed to Franco. Before their
divorce in 1981, the couple reared four
daughters. The eldest, Josephine,
committed suicide last September, aged
33, after a period of mental illness and
an accident which led to the loss of her
legs.
Irving also has a daughter by his
36-year-old Danish partner.
Irving, who has been banned from the
German state archives and expelled
from Austria, Italy, Canada and
Germany, claims he has suffered a
barrage of abuse and death threats on
his unlisted phone number.
He agrees he once had swizzlesticks
adorned with swastikas at a book party -
symptomatic of the in-your-face
defiance of the gauche schoolboy he
often resembles - but denies Nazi
sympathies.
And the tale of a portrait of Hitler over
his desk is the stuff of legend, he says -
the only signed photo on display is one
of Winston Churchill.
Irving has denied having any politics
other than a brief student adherence to
the Young Conservatives. "My views
are independent and sometimes
unorthodox, but never anti-democratic,"
he said. "I am not anti-Semitic."
- (PA)
==
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London)
April 12, 2000, Wednesday
Racist who twisted the truth
Michael Horsnell and Alex O'Connell
DAVID IRVING'S reputation as an historian was demolished yesterday when his
High Court libel case ended with him branded an anti-Semitic, racist
Holocaust denier and pro-Nazi polemicist.
"Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately
misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence," Mr Justice Gray said at
the end of the 32-day hearing. "For the same reasons, he has portrayed
Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in relation to his
attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews".
And while the judge said it was not his function to express a view of what
happened during the Nazi era, his verdict will set a benchmark for
historians of the period and Mr Irving faces a future as an academic pariah..
The crushing defeat has also left Mr Irving facing a Pounds 2.5million legal
bill which he claims he cannot pay. Costs have still to be settled at a
future hearing, but the judge warned the historian that he would have to pay
the "vast bulk" of the expenses incurred by the American academic Deborah
Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books.
Mr Irving had sued them for libel over claims in her book, Denying the
Holocaust: the Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, that he was a "Hitler
partisan" who had denied the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Before the judgment Mr Irving, who claims to have no significant assets but
his spacious flat in Mayfair, told The Times that he expected Penguin Books
to make him bankrupt if he lost. Penguin said it would take "active steps"
to pursue him for its costs, but sources accepted that the company was
unlikely to recoup its outlay. A statement from the publisher said: "What
today's judgment has proved is that we were right to stand by the content of
our book and that it was entirely inappropriate of David Irving to seek to
suppress the book by way of a libel action."
The defendants had turned down an offer from Mr Irving to settle out of
court for Pounds 500 to be paid to charity. They decided to fight because it
would have been "morally repugnant" to concede.
Mr Irving says he has raised a fighting fund of $500,000 (Pounds 317,000) in
an Internet appeal, but refuses to say who his backers are.After the verdict
yesterday, he was escorted through the rear exit of the High Court by
security staff to a waiting taxi, saying only: "The judgment was perverse. I
shall be appealing."
The judge had refused him leave to appeal, but said he was free to apply
directly to the Court of Appeal.
Later, at his home, Mr Irving said: "I would describe the judgment in two
words - firstly, indescribable, and secondly, perverse." He refused to talk
about the cost of losing the case. "Why is everyone talking about money? I'm
not interested in money. It is all about reputation," he said.
He remained unrepentant about what the judge saw as racist and anti-Semitic
views, saying: "I am not at all anti-Semitic. It is not anti-Semitic to be
critical of the Jews. But the leaders of the Jewish communities around the
world have used the most horrific methods to try and destroy me. Some people
are vindictive, but that is not in my nature. I am a Christian through and
through."
A jubilant Professor Lipstadt said she was delighted and felt "exceptionally
vindicated". Later she told a press conference: "One of the most moving
moments did not happen in the court proceedings but outside when I was
enveloped by (Holocaust) survivors who said thank you."
Professor Lipstadt had received a call the night before from a man who had
been in the Resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. He had spoken indirectly on
behalf of all Holocaust survivors to say: "Deborah, you sleep well tonight,
because we're not sleeping." She added: "I've had enough of Irving's
cesspool for the last five years. I would expect no respectable institution
or publication to give him a platform. I hope this victory will save other
authors from having to face such trials and tribulations."
The judgment was hailed by Lord Janner of Braunstone, chairman of the
Holocaust Education Trust, as an epic victory for truth. "The Irving case
shows the crucial importance of educating our young people in the tragedy of
the Holocaust especially as a symbol of the dangers of allowing racist
dictatorships to rule," he said.
The Israeli Minister for Israeli Society and World Jewish Communities, Rabbi
Michael Melchior, said the judgment delivered the message that Holocaust
deniers should be regarded alongside the worst of the Nazis. He called for
the ruling to be taught in schools everywhere.
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London)
April 12, 2000, Wednesday
He came to bury Irving not to praise him
Valerie Grove
IN A sea of black gowns, the man in shirtsleeves and waistcoat - his jacket
stained by a flying egg from an ill-wisher - stands out. The profile is
pugnacious, the eyebrow a quizzical arrowhead, the face imperturbable.
Judged from an oblique courtroom view, David Irving looked bullish,
iron-grey hair framing a fiercely florid complexion. Was it glowing health,
mounting fury, or just the warmth in the packed courtroom?
There was standing room only, to the dismay of those unseated for the
two-hour duration of the judge's deliberations. The 66 pages concerning
David John Cadwell Irving, litigant in person, v Penguin Books and Deborah
E. Lipstadt were distributed five minutes before the judge made his entry.
The whisper went round the court: "Irving's lost." It was as if the
first-night audience at The Mousetrap had been issued with Agatha Christie's
script and knew whodunnit before the curtain rose. Irving, too, knew that
the game was up.
But there was not a moment's boredom in court. Mr Justice Gray, Wykehamist
and Oxford scholar, undaunted by the pronouncing of abtransportieren;
Mischlinge; or Badenanstalten fur sonderaktionen, maintained a delivery that
was unemphatic and judicious even at its most damning. No detail was left
unscrutinised. He presented the court with a crescendo of evidence,
diligently considered, even though he stressed: "It is no part of my
function to attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the
Nazi regime."
In the event, there was much to be learnt about what concentration of
cyanide would be needed to penetrate brickwork and kill people rather than
to fumigate clothing, and whether there were gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Irving had sounded confident on the Today programme a couple of hours before
his fate was known. He expected his reputation to be enhanced, having taken
on the scholars single-handed in sustained cross-examination.
And Mr Justice Gray did allow that "as a military historian, Irving has much
to commend him". His research was thorough and painstaking, his knowledge of
the Second World War "unparalleled". "He is beyond question able and
intelligent, moreover he writes his military history in a clear and vivid
style."
This was a "Brutus is an honourable man" encomium, an oratorical ploy before
the condemnation ahead. The judge acknowledged the possibility that camp
survivors might have embellished or cross-pollinated their experiences,
building up a corpus of false testimony.
But in the light of such fair-minded caveats, the judge's conclusions were
all the more devastating. Irving had distorted, misrepresented or
manipulated the evidence to conform with his own preconceptions. His
activities revealed him to be a right-wing pro-Nazi polemicist, anti-Semitic
and racist and one who associates with right-wing extremists who promote
neo-Nazism.
Irving had said on Radio 4 that he doubted he would have the legal expertise
to appeal; and that a verdict against him could hardly leave him worse off
than before, since no publisher would touch him.
But when the moment came, he was not to be so summarily crushed. He stood to
address the judge, manifesting neither anger nor contrition.
He would, after all, appeal. He now realised that he had not explained
himself with "sufficient clarity". Irving was defiant, unbowed, and,
although a lone figure hoist with his own petard, somehow without pathos.
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London)
April 12, 2000, Wednesday
Irving's cash backers stay in the shadows
Alex O'Connell, Michael Horsnell and Linus Gregoriardis
THE search was under way last night to identify the loyal supporters who
financed David Irving's legal battle.
The Jewish Board of Deputies in London believes that his main supporters are
German Nazis who fled to America after the Second World War and young
neo-nazi white supremacists living in the United States.
The board last night claimed that Mr Irving had raised at least Pounds 2
million, although he has denied repeatedly having more than Pounds 315,000
in the coffers.
Although Mr Irving has refused to name his backers, it is believed that
funds have been received from some of the 4,000 supporters mentioned on his
official website.
The historian is believed to have been funded by such far-right groups as
the National Alliance, based in Tampa, Florida. It was mentioned during the
trial that he had spoken at eight of the alliance's events between 1990 and
1998.
It is also believed that Mr Irving has been supported by the German People's
Union, an anti-Semitic party. For ten years, until he was banned from
Germany in 1993, he had a close relationship with the GPU leader Gerhard
Frey, a wealthy publisher.
Mr Irving has been a "star speaker" at revisionist conferences organised by
Ewald Althans, named in court as a leading neo-Nazi in Munich who sells and
distributes the historian's books, videos and cassettes.
One independent name with far-right links who has been associated repeatedly
with Mr Irving is David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klansman who is now a
chairman of the New Orleans-based National Organisation For European
American Rights (NOFEAR). He is known to be one of Mr Irving's admirers.
Mike Whine, of the Board of Deputies, said he believed that Mr Duke had
either directly or indirectly supported Mr Irving. "He will have introduced
a lot of people to him for fundraising purposes over the last four or five
years," he said.
Vince Edwards, Mr Duke's administrative assistant and NOFEAR's media
co-ordinator, said yesterday that he was disappointed, but not surprised, by
the judgment. He said that Mr Duke had been "supportive" of Mr Irving.
Commenting on the judge's decision, Mr Edwards said: "I was extremely
disheartened but I couldn't have imagined what the judge would find in his
favour. The way the system worked, he would probably have found himself out
of a job. You can imagine if the judge had sided with Irving, what the
Jewish Board of Deputies would have done to his family. There would have
been a campaign aginst him."
He added: "I think it is a disaster, but hopefully he can appeal."
Mr Edwards said that the two men had met but were not "intimate" friends.
"David is just supportive," he said.
Mr Edwards did not believe that Mr Duke had given Mr Irving financial support.
The historian's website lays out payment options for potential contributors
who may "mail a personal cheque", "mail cash in an envelope", "make a bank
transfer" or "simply use your credit card". The payment, it adds, will
appear on the card as "History Bookshop".
LINKS
www.courtservice.gov.uk The High Court judgment
www.fpp.co.uk David Irving's action report
www.emory.edu/UDR/handbook/lipstadt.html Deborah Lipstadt
www.wiesenthal.com Simon Wiesenthal Centre
www.holocaust-history.org Holocaust History Project
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London)
April 12, 2000, Wednesday
Judge delivers a devastating condemnation
Michael Horsnell
THE libel trial judge labelled David Irving a "right-wing pro-Nazi
polemicist" who had manipulated the historical record to make it conform to
his own political agenda.
Mr Justice Gray said that the maverick historian was a Holocaust-denier with
antiSemitic and racist views, and berated him for his "offensive" assertion
that no Jew was gassed at Auschwitz. "No fair-minded historian would have
serious cause to doubt" that hundreds of thousands were gassed at the Nazi
camp, he said.
Reading a 66-page extract of his full judgment, the judge said: "Over the
past 15 years or so, Irving appears to have become more active politically
than was previously the case. He speaks regularly at political and
quasi-political meetings in Germany, the United States, Canada and the New
World. The content of his speeches and interviews often displays a
distinctly pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish bias.
"He makes surprising and often unfounded assertions about the Nazi regime
which tend to exonerate the Nazis for the appalling atrocities which they
inflicted on the Jews.
"He is content to mix with neo-Fascists and appears to share many of their
racist and anti-Semite prejudices. The picture of Irving that emerges from
the evidence of his extra-curricular activities reveals him to be a
right-wing, proNazi polemicist.
"In my view, the defendants have established that Irving has a political
agenda. It is one which, it is legitimate to infer, disposes him, where he
deems it necessary, to manipulate the historical record in order to make it
conform with his political beliefs."
The judge said that he "has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favourable
light, principally in relation to his attitude towards, and responsibility
for, the treatment of the Jews".
Mr Irving, in his shirtsleeves and a black and red waistcoat, sat in the row
that was also occupied by his adversary, the defence counsel, Richard
Rampton QC. The historian of the Third Reich stared into the middle distance
as the judge said that he also found him to be "an active Holocaust-denier;
that he is anti-Semitic and racist".
The judge said there were certain imputations in Deborah Lipstadt's book
which he had found to be defamatory of Mr Irving. But he added that the
charges against him which have been proved true were of "sufficient gravity"
for it to be clear that the failure to establish the truth of other matters
did not have any material effect on the author's reputation.
The judge said that the issue with which he was concerned was Mr Irving's
treatment of the available evidence. "It is no part of my function to
attempt to make findings as to what actually happened during the Nazi
regime. The distinction may be a fine one, but it is important to bear it in
mind."
On the credit side, he told the court: "My assessment is that, as a military
historian, Irving has much to commend him. For his works of military
history, Irving has undertaken thorough and painstaking research into the
archives. He has discovered and disclosed to historians and others many
documents which, but for his efforts, might have remained unnoticed for years."
He added: "It was plain from the way in which he conducted his case and
dealt with a sustained and penetrating cross-examination that his knowledge
of World War Two is unparalleled. His mastery of the detail of the
historical documents is remarkable. He is beyond question able and
intelligent."
But, Mr Justice Gray told the court: "The questions to which this action has
given rise do not relate to the quality of Irving's military history but
rather to the manner in which he has written about the attitude adopted by
Hitler towards the Jews, and in particular his responsibility for the fate
which befell them under the Nazi regime."
The judge said the defendants had selected 19 instances where they contended
that Mr Irving had distorted the evidence. "I have come to the conclusion
that the criticisms advanced by the defendants are almost invariably well
founded".
He was satisfied that "in most of the instances cited by the defendants
Irving has significantly misrepresented what the evidence, objectively
examined, reveals. The charges which I have found to be substantially true
include the charges that Irving has, for his own ideological reasons,
persistently and deliberately misinterpreted and manipulated historical
evidence."
He accused Mr Irving of "double standards" when assessing historical
evidence and said his account of matters "flies in the face" of available
evidence. He "deliberately skewed the evidence to bring it into line with
his political beliefs". He added: "Irving appears to take every opportunity
to exculpate Hitler."
He quoted from the "undeniably racist" ditty composed by Mr Irving for his
daughter, putting into her mouth the words: "I am a baby Aryan. I have no
plans to marry an Ape or Rastafarian." There was also his queasiness about
black men playing cricket for England. "I accept that Irving is not obsessed
with race. He has certainly not condoned or excused racist violence or
thuggery. But he has on many occasions spoken in terms which are plainly
racist."
Branding him anti-Semitic, the judge said: "His words are directed against
Jews, either individually or collectively, in the sense that they are by
turns hostile, critical, offensive and derisory in their references to
Semitic people."
As an example, he said Mr Irving claimed that Jews deserved to be disliked
and had brought the Holocaust on themselves, that Jewish financiers were
crooked, that Jews generated anti-Semitism by their greed and mendacity, and
that the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal had a "hideous, leering, evil face".
The judge rejected Mr Irving's claims that the gas chambers were a
propaganda lie invented by British Intelligence and that few Jews died in
them. "It appears to me incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a
Holocaust-denier," he said. "It is my conclusion that no objective,
fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas
chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to
kill hundreds of thousands of Jews."
He added: "Not only has he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz
and asserted that no Jew was gassed there, he has done so on frequent
occasions and sometimes in the most offensive terms. By way of examples, I
cite his story of the Jew climbing into a mobile telephone box-cum-gas
chamber; his claim that more people died in the back of Kennedy's car at
Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz; his dismissal of
the eyewitnesses en masse as liars or as suffering from a mental problem;
his reference to an Association of Auschwitz Survivors and Other Liars or
'ASSHOLS'."
Mr Irving had also made broader claims which "tend to minimise the
Holocaust". He had minimised the number of those killed by means other than
gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere. The judge said it appeared to him undeniable
that most, if not all, of the statements made by Mr Irving and cited by the
defendants as demonstrating his anti-Semitism revealed "clear evidence that,
in the absence of any excuse or suitable explanation for what he said or
wrote, Irving is anti-Semitic".
He said: "His words are directed against Jews, either individually or
collectively, in the sense that they are by turns hostile, critical,
offensive and derisory in their references to Semitic people, their
characteristics and appearances."
Mr Irving's principal justification for his comments about Jews was that he
was seeking to explain to Jews why anti-Semitism exists, and not himself
adopting the anti-Semitism, the judge said. "But I do not think that this
was the message that Irving was seeking to convey to his audiences, and it
was certainly not the sense in which his remarks were understood."
The judge agreed that Jews were as open to criticism as anyone. But Mr
Irving had "repeatedly crossed the divide between legitimate criticism and
prejudiced vilification".
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London)
April 12, 2000, Wednesday
False witness
Michael Horsnell
David Irving was accused of being a racist zealot who, by denying the
Holocaust, had manipulated history. Yesterday he lost the libel action
brought to clear his name. Has he changed his mind? Interview by Michael
Horsnell
The watercolour on the wall behind David Irving's desk is not, as some
detractors claim, Adolf Hitler's self-portrait. Irving does own that
picture; it was given to him by Christa Schroder, the Fuhrer's private
secretary, who had taken it for safe-keeping at the end of the war. But he
has it locked away in a glass case.
Instead, the unframed portrait is of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the avuncular
American president. More interesting is the signed photograph of Churchill,
whom Irving has condemned as a drunken warmonger, that hangs in the passage
and bears the inscription: "Your friendship has been a very great privilege
to me." When I remark on it, Irving smiles and raises his bushy eyebrows in
a manner curiously reminiscent of Rudolf Hess. "Bought it at auction," he says.
Irving is the maverick historian who sees Hitler as "no greater incarnation
of evil" than the Allied leaders. He has just spent two months pursuing a
libel case in the High Court against the American author Professor Deborah
Lipstadt and her publishers, Penguin. The action centred on Lipstadt's
assertion in her latest book, Denying the Holocaust: the Growing Assault on
Truth and Memory, that Irving was one of the world's most prominent and
dangerous "Holocaust deniers".
Yesterday Mr Justice Gray came down on the side of Lipstadt. Losing will
cost Irving dear; though he conducted his own case in court, he has still
incurred costs put at Pounds 2.5 million. His imposing mansion flat in
Mayfair - where he has lived for 32 years and which he shares with his
Danish girlfriend Bente, 35, and their daughter Jessica, six - may have to
be sold.
"The consequences of losing should worry me a lot more, but you get to the
position where you insulate yourself," he says. "I don't allow it to keep me
awake. I have taken no steps whatever, like putting things in my partner's
name. No smart accountants have been hired to hide funds away. There are no
other significant assets; my assets are my intellectual properties. If
disaster strikes, it's true disaster.
"I have no doubt (the defendants) would drive me to bankruptcy. But there
would be some consolation. I was growing tired of living in Mayfair anyway."
Irving, 62, the author of 30 books, professes to have lost Pounds 200,000 a
year for the past three years through not writing a line while concentrating
on his litigation. But he is believed to have raised up to $500,000 on his
fighting fund website, where he describes Lipstadt as "the golden-tipped
spearhead of the enemies of truth". Irving supporters from America, Germany
and Scandinavia have provided individual donations ranging from $5 to
$50,000. Unsurprisingly, he wishes to keep the identity of his benefactors
secret.
During the High Court case, Richard Rampton, QC, the counsel for Lipstadt
and Penguin Books, cited many examples of Irving's zealotry. They included
his attempts to pervert the mind of his baby daughter with a racist ditty
while walking her in her pram, and a quote from an Irving speech, delivered
in Calgary, Canada, in September 1991, in which he asserted "more women died
in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in
a gas chamber at Auschwitz". By being so overtly anti-Semitic, Irving had,
Rampton said, prostituted his calling as an historian.
But Irving, as always, is unrepentant. He claims that at the outset of the
case he offered to settle if the defendants paid Pounds 500 to charity in
memory of his late daughter Josephine, one of his four daughters by his
Spanish wife Pilar (the couple divorced in 1981), who died last year aged 34 .
"They rejected it," he says. "They wanted a scrap, so I gave them one. I had
to take action. I don't find it hurtful being called all sorts of names. But
the campaign against me had reached such intensity that I could no longer
ignore it. It would have destroyed my livelihood."
Despite having been the one who pursued the libel case, he sees himself as
the victim. The reading of extracts from his diaries by the defence counsel,
he says, made him feel "violated".
"You keep a diary for your personal use. When my daughter died I reread the
entries I made about her when she was one and two. It was very distressing.
Now they are public property.
"But I am no fool. I realised as soon as I went into the witness box that
they would have a field day with me. I have no regrets. It's been the most
exhausting phase of my life but I put up a pretty decent fight."
As a dedicated exponent of revisionism, Irving remains defiant in his
assertion that Hitler knew nothing of a Final Solution, in which up to six
million Jews died. He purports the Holocaust to be a myth deployed by Jews
in order to blackmail the German people into paying vast sums in reparations.
At his feet is what he calls the "holy of holies", an enlarged aerial
photograph of crematorium No 2 at Birkenau. There is, he contends, no
evidence of the manholes through which survivors say the deadly gas pellets
were inserted. As he points to the picture, he spits out the words: "The
so-called factory of death!"
His beliefs may be considered by many to be outrageously distasteful, but
they are not new. In 1970, he faced a bill of Pounds 70,000 in damages and
costs for reinventing history in his book The Destruction of Convoy PQ17.He
had libelled the convoy commander, Captain John Broome, by wrongly blaming
him for its destruction by German aircraft and U-boats. At an unsuccessful
appeal before Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, and Lord Justice Phillimore
in 1971 Irving was described as a "grasping, conceited and foolish young man".
His empathy with all things German had been evident from his first book, The
Destruction of Dresden, published in 1963, written after he had spent a year
as a steelworker in the Ruhr for Thyssen. Already a Germanophile, he
listened intently to a fellow worker who told him of the Allied air raids,
then began his research.
Rampton, who read the book in preparation for his client's libel defence,
says Irving had exaggerated the number of deaths in the Allied bombing of
Dresden by tenfold - 250,000 fatalities, instead of the official estimates
of 25,000 - to make a "false equivalence" between the victims and the number
of Jews killed at Auschwitz. The Dresden book predicated Irving's career,
giving him an entree to Hitler's inner circle. From those who had survived,
and the widows of those who had not, he was to acquire a wealth of documents
and accounts that put him head and shoulders above his peers as a researcher
of the Third Reich's history.
But by sanitising the Nazis and absolving Hitler of genocide, Irving's
stance has led to clashes and controversy. Over the years, demonstrators
have paraded placards outside his home demanding "Gas Irving"; he has been
assaulted in a restaurant; and when his daughter Jessica was a baby, he says
he had to keep a Moses basket handy by a window in order to lower her by
rope to ground level in the event of his apartment being stormed.
Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander who served at the Battle of
Jutland in 1916 and on Arctic convoys during World War Two. But his parents
separated when he was young; John Irving was reunited with his son only in
the last two years of his life, from 1965 to 1967, when David was in his
late twenties.
The young David was raised by his mother, a commercial artist who had
studied at the Slade School of Art, and who was forced, because of the
breakdown of her marriage, to bring up her four children in much-reduced
circumstances. Irving has a twin, Nicholas, a civil servant, who announced
their estrangement in 1992. The family originated from Portsmouth: Irving's
earliest memories include cheering with the crowds as the troopships left
for Normandy in 1944. Later he became a pupil at Sir Anthony Browne's, a
grammar school in Brentwood, Essex, where he achieved notoriety by choosing
a copy of Mein Kampf as a school prize, not because he wanted the book, he
says, but because he wanted to shock.
He gained 13 O levels, and eight A levels. But despite embarking upon two
degrees - the first at Imperial College London, where he read physics, and
the second at University College London, where he took economics - he
dropped out of both courses and failed to graduate.
From his earliest student days he was politically active. At Imperial he
joined the Young Conservatives and edited Phoenix, the college magazine
founded by H.G. Wells. In 1959, his final year there, he also edited the
college's Carnival Times, causing a stink when he engineered it to incur
costs that cancelled out the profits of that year's carnival after learning
that the proceeds were destined for a South African subversive organisation.
At University College, in 1962, he spoke with Oswald Mosley in support of
the motion "This House would restrict Commonwealth immigration".
His reputation, as a writer as well as an activist, was already gaining him
enemies. In 1964, two Jews - Manny Carpel, then 20, and Gerald Gable, then
26 - posing as GPO engineers were fined after breaking into his flat. They
believed he was a fascist and had hoped to find political material that they
could take to Special Branch. Gable, who later became the publisher of the
anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, remained a lifelong adversary.
After publication in 1991 of the expanded edition of Hitler's War, Irving
says, "it became evident that publishers around the country had pressure put
on them directly or indirectly not to publish me".
Undeniably, he has been ostracised by the publishing world;houses such as
Macmillan in London and St Martin's Press in New York were not about to
ignore protests from Jewish groups about his "repellent" views.
He blames his exile on a "global endeavour" by his most powerful enemies:
the Anti-Defamation League in the US, the Board of Deputies of British Jews,
the Jewish Defence League, and the Simon Weisenthal Centre, which, he says,
have established an "international campaign to destroy my legitimacy". He
sees Lipstadt as an ambassador of what he deems the international Jewish
conspiracy against him.
Irving has been banned from a host of nations, including Germany, which is
seeking his extradition on charges of racial incitement over a lecture he
gave to the right-wing NPD at Weinheim. He says his exclusion has denied him
access to precious Third Reich archives on which much of his research depends.
But he is nothing if not tenacious. In 1990 he launched his own imprint,
Focal Point Publications. With his libel case over, he says he is now
editing Vol 2 of his Churchill biography, Triumph in Adversity, and is
working on a biography of Heinrich Himmler, based on access he was given in
America to 200 letters the SS chief wrote to his mistress.
"I have all the material I need, though being barred from the German
archives is a serious matter," he says. "There's a lot of material like this
in American homes. US troops captured Himmler's house, looted it and carried
trophies home. I want to get into Himmler's mentality rather than the
history of the SS."
Irving talks enthusiastically about the "astonishingly good economics" of
publishing his own books, an enterprise that involves driving a truck to
hundreds of bookshops around the country hawking his work. "I get the
author's cut, the publisher's cut and the distributor's cut," he says with
relish.
He also sells his books via the Internet, though he mutters about an
"Orwellian exercise" by some bodies to filter out his website. "They are
trying to stop me expressing an opinion," he says. "My case against Lipstadt
has been about free speech."
He is disappointed that Lipstadt did not take the stand during the case,
denying him the chance to cross-examine her. "I'd have asked about her
racism, though I'm sure the judge would have intervened. She has written
several articles about the importance of Jews marrying only Jews. That's
racist. It's the hypocrisy that annoys me.
"She is on record as saying she would never debate with revisionists, but it
came as a surprise when she did not give evidence. I accuse her of a lack of
courage."
Ask Irving if he accepts he is a racist and he replies: "The scumbags say I
am but I have had the most terrific blacks, Pakistanis, you name them,
working for me, and I haven't seen one working on all the benches occupied
by Lipstadt's team in court."
His response to accusations of anti-Semitism is equally well versed. "If I
were a Jew, I should be far more concerned not at who pulled the trigger,
but why. Anti-Semitism is a recurring malaise. There must be some reason why
anti-Semitic groups break out like some kind of epidemic."
The next step in his crusade may be another libel case, against the writer
Gitta Sereny over an article she wrote about obssession- even though she is
gracious enough to acknowledge, amid her contempt for his revisionism, that
he is a "man of talent, both as a researcher and a writer".
Certainly Irving's greatest accomplishment is that he was the first
historian to warn, in 1983, that The Hitler Diaries were fakes. Lord Dacre,
who, as Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, originally authenticated the "diaries",
says of him: "I regard Irving as a very industrious and efficient
investigator, and hunter of documents, a hard worker and good writer. That
is on the credit side.
"But I don't regard him as an historian. I don't think he has any historical
sense. He is a propagandist who uses efficiently collected and arranged
material to support a propagandist line."
Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, adds: "He has
fallen so far short of the standards of scholarship customary among
historians that he does not deserve to be called an historian at all."
If his peers' views are any sort of template, Irving will be remembered as a
pariah, a dangerous falsifier of the blackest chapter in 20th-century
history and, ultimately, a man whose veracity could not be trusted.
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London)
April 12, 2000, Wednesday
This awful lie and why I had to fight it
Michael Horsnell
MORE people believe Elvis Presley is still alive than those who dismiss the
Holocaust as an invention. But denying that the darkest chapter of the last
century ever took place is "like a slow invasion of termites" eating away at
the truth, according to the Jewish American academic Deborah Lipstadt.
With the gradual passing away of those who survived the Nazi death camps and
the growing influence of right-wing revisionist historians such as David
Irving, the engaging Professor Lipstadt has seen the writing on the wall.
That is why she devoted her academic research to the subject and wrote
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, her third
book, published by Penguin in 1994. In it she identified Irving as "one of
the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial", and he sued for libel.
Irving accepts that tragedy befell the Jews, but he defines the Holocaust (a
word he normally shrinks from using) in somewhat rounder terms. He says: "It
was the whole of World War Two, and the people who died were not just Jews
but gypsies and homosexuals, the people of Coventry and the people of
Hiroshima."
Professor Lipstadt rejected an invitation to settle out of court before his
action began. She says: "Normally, I don't debate with these people on
principle because I don't think they should be treated as 'the other side'.
It would be the equivalent of asking astronomers to debate whether the earth
is flat. It's lunacy.
"But if I hadn't fought, he would have won by default and people would have
thought his version of the Holocaust to be a legitimate definition."
Professor Lipstadt, a striking 52-year-old redhead, holds the Dorot Chair in
Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
She is the daughter of Erwin Lipstadt, a German Jew who emigrated to the
United States in 1928 and became a successful businessman, and his wife
Miriam, a Canadian whose parents crossed the border when she was a child.
A New Yorker, the Professor is a leading light in Jewish cultural studies.
She has recently been reappointed by the White House to the executive
committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Council, a body entrusted by Congress
with responsibility for administering the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
She has also just completed a term as adviser to Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright on religious discrimination abroad and the United
States's foreign policy response to it.
After spending most of the last three months cooped up in a London hotel,
she plans to write a book about the trial when she returns to America. To
the irritation of David Irving, the woman who called him a dishonest
historian and Hitler partisan became the quiet American in court by
declining to enter the witness box and give evidence. She says: "On some
levels I would love to have mixed it up with him. I was willing to take the
stand but my lawyers felt there was no need for me to give evidence."
With some satisfaction, she adds: "This trial demonstrated the degree to
which Irving manipulates historical truth, and we entered numerous examples
into the public record.
"It reaffirmed the fact that the Holocaust can be easily and fully
documented by historians through the use of primary sources."
Despite her belief that Irving is guilty of rewriting history, the Professor
defends the right of historians to reappraise the Holocaust.
She says: "We are not dealing here with sacred canon and I defend the right
of historians to re-examine and ask questions. But it must be based on the
evidence, not on what they want it to say. That is their job.
"If somebody could come up and prove that it was less or more than six
million Jews who perished, that's OK. This is not theology.
"But David Irving is not doing this. The evidence demonstrated this man is
not an historian. His work is a tissue of lies, manipulation and distortion."
How does Professor Lipstadt regard the dangers of revisionism? She says: "As
long as there are survivors, the danger is mitigated. They can stand up and
say 'I am not lying about the Holocaust; where are my parents and brothers?'
I don't see deniers as a clear and present danger, I see them as a clear and
future danger.
"It is easy to plant the seed of doubt in people's minds. It makes sense in
a perverse way. You are talking about something so monstrous in the
Holocaust that it calls for a suspension of disbelief. It would be a much
nicer world if, indeed, there had been no Holocaust. There is something in
us that would prefer deniers to be right. The problem is, Irving is wrong,
and he is lying."
Despite that, Professor Lipstadt opposes laws in force in much of Europe
that make Holocaust denial a criminal offence. "I don't think they work,"
she argues. "It makes martyrs out of deniers. It makes it look as if we have
something to hide. I am an advocate of free speech as much as possible. But
we can't cry fire in a crowded theatre. We can't have a free platform to
allow people to say what they want regardless."
Michael Horsnell
Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London)
April 12, 2000, Wednesday
History and bunk
Mr Justice Gray's trenchant dismissal of the libel suit brought by the
historian David Irving against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books
confirms him to be the "liar and falsifier of history" of the Holocaust that
the defendants held him to be. The judge further found him to be anti-Semite
and "Holocaust denier" who "has repeatedly crossed the divide between
legitimate criticism and prejudiced vilification of the Jewish race and
people".
For both sides, the issues in this case were freedom of speech and
professional integrity. Mr Irving, who conducted his own case in a two-month
trial involving some 400 files of documents, claimed before the verdict that
whatever the outcome, his reputation would be enhanced "because of my
ability to stand up to the experts". His stamina held up; but his reputation
has been damaged beyond repair, and by his own deliberate act in bringing
the case.
Mr Irving says that he is not an historian of the Holocaust and that the
subject "bores" him. That has not prevented him from making the following
assertions; Hitler did not order the extermination of Europe's Jews and was
ignorant of their fate until 1943; there was no systematic Nazi plan; the
total death toll was about one million, not six million; and the gas
chambers of Auschwitz did not exist.
To seek to defend such propositions in court might be thought by a layman to
be pure folly. As both the judge and Mr Irving observed, however, the
outcome hung not on what actually happened in the Second World War - a
subject on which Mr Irving's mastery of the archival detail is formidable -
but, in Mr Irving's words, on "what I knew of it, and what I made of it".
Mr Irving complained that Professor Lipstadt's book was the culmination of a
30-year conspiracy to silence him, and with him, alternative historical
interpretations of the Holocaust. The claim is preposterous. But to make the
defence of justification stand, the defendants had to show not only that Mr
Irving's facts were wrong, but that, as a "Hitler partisan", he deliberately
and from ideological motives manipulated evidence, particularly of the
Holocaust, in order, as the judge said, to portray Hitler "in an
unwarrantedly favourable light".
Mr Irving is an intellectual bruiser. In court, as outside, he dismissed
eyewitness statements on Auschwitz - Nazi as well as Jewish - as
"worthless". He held awkward documents to be either forgeries or unknown to
him, leading him to claim in court not to have read books he owns or has
publicly criticised. Asked what the Eichmann memoirs, released by Israel in
February, meant by Gaseinlage (gassing camps), he said he had not had time
to look at them. Mr Irving has always relied on the fact that the SS
destroyed the gas chambers to argue that they never existed and that cyanide
traces found in the camps showed only that the Nazis used "hygienic methods"
to delouse corpses and combat typhus. When his most offensive anti-Semitic
comments were read or played back to him, they were either just jokes, or an
effort to explain why anti-Semitism exists. Shown evidence that in just
three mobile gas chambers, 97,000 Jews were killed, he "humbly" said that he
must then be wrong about "limited experiments" with gas. It was a rare and
purely tactical retreat.
History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory against Mr
Irving's ideologically motivated abuse of the intellectual discipline of
which he is a master. The case has indeed been a victory for free speech,
and truth as well; a lesson to be pondered in Germany, where Holocaust
denial is a crime. A British court has produced a more sophisticated and
effective cross-examination of Holocaust denial than a ban could ever
provide. The judge found that in 19 specific instances, Professor Lipstadt's
criticisms were "almost invariably well-founded". For Mr Irving, that
judgment is "perverse". The epithet applies with considerably more force to
his own indefensible perversions of the 20th century's most appalling truth.
Copyright 2000 The Irish Times The Irish Times
April 12, 2000
Holocaust Denial
An active Holocaust denier, an anti-Semite and a racist, a man who
associates with right-wing extremists and promoters of neo-Nazism. The
judgment handed down yesterday by a London High Court in the libel action,
brought by the historian and author David Irving against Penguin Books and
an American academic Deborah Lipstadt, is blunt and to the point. It is also
entirely justified and much to be welcomed.
Mr Justice Gray, who sat without a jury, deserves credit for cutting through
Mr Irving's nonsense about freedom of speech and academic freedom. This was
a case about truth - the truth regarding the single greatest crime of the
20th century. Irving has sought for years to portray himself as a humble
seeker after truth, a lonely knight fighting, as he would see it, mythology
and self-serving distortions about the Holocaust - mythology and distortions
that were created, in his view, by Jews.
But Judge Gray, in his damning 300 page judgment, said Irving was indeed a
denier of the Holocaust. He denies the existence of gas chambers at
Auschwitz (a tourist attraction built by the Poles, he claims) and asserts
that no Jew was gassed there. He has done so frequently and in the most
offensive terms, said the judge.
Irving's theories are not the stuff of irrelevant debate in some rarified
recesses of academe. The man is a hero to Holocaust revisionists and those
who seek to detach history's assessment of Adolf Hitler from the reality of
what the Nazis did to their fellow human beings. Herein lies the poison of
Irving's dumbing down of mankind's collective memory of the Holocaust. This
event, the systematic, mass murder of some six million people, most, though
not all of them Jews, is unparalleled in human history. No regime in
recorded history has set out to wipe from the face of the earth an entire
ethnic group simply because of its religious belief and culture. What
happened in the famine (an Irish commentator recently made the comparison)
is entirely different and more complex than is often allowed by some
commentators.
A true and accurate understanding of the Holocaust is important because it
can inform us of the need to show respect and tolerance for minorities, for
people who are different from ourselves. Those who control our memory of the
past possess a unique opportunity to fashion our future. If one thinks the
truth about the Holocaust is unimportant, ask a neo-Nazi in today's Germany
- better still, ask an asylum seeker cowering in a hostel, living in terror
of the mobs that regularly attack them.
David Irving richly deserves the financial ruin now facing him and the
destruction of what little reputation he had. And it is worth noting what
did for him in the end. It was not argy-bargy on university campuses, it was
not a hail of rotten eggs and the shouting down of his message by strident
adolescent voices. It was the clinical, forensic examination of his credo, a
calculated and methodical destruction of his untruthful version of history.
Copyright 2000 The Irish Times The Irish Times
April 12, 2000
Irving exposed as a liar with no interest in pursuit of truth The defeat of
the Holocaust denier, David Irving, in a London libel court is a victory for
truth and democracy, suggests David Cesarani
A common misconception about the libel case brought by David Irving against
the American academic Deborah Lipstadt is that history was on trial. It
titillated the prurient who like to dabble in the pornography of Holocaust
denial and appealed to those looking for a backlash against the Holocaust,
to suggest that the factuality of the Holocaust was at issue. It never was.
Irving said fatefully in his opening statement: "This trial is not really
about what happened in the Holocaust, or how many Jews and other persecuted
minorities were put to death. This court will, I hope, agree with me when
the time comes that the issue before us is not what happened, but how I
treated it in my works of history." He was right.
The trial was not about interpretations of history, or what it is
"permissible" to say. It was not about freedom of speech. Nor was it even
about the past: its true gravity lay in the present and the future. The
outcome of the trial will not alter events from 1933 to 1945, but it will
have a profound impact on the defence of truth and democracy in years to come.
Irving sued Prof Lipstadt after she labelled him a Holocaust denier in her
1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, and placed him in the ranks of those who
manipulate and distort history according to a political agenda.
This was immensely damaging to his reputation because, until the early
1990s, Irving was treated as just a wayward, right-wing historian who was
efficient at digging up new material about the Third Reich. His books were
respectfully reviewed in worthy newspapers and his reputation as an English
man of letters gave him stature in many countries.
No one looked that hard at what he wrote or, more importantly, how he
worked. Perhaps this was because he enjoyed the supreme condescension of the
literary and academic establishment, who seem to have regarded him as little
more than a pleb with a talent for grubbing around in archives and the
patience to woo the shrivelled widows of Nazi functionaries who nobody else
wanted to interview.
In her book, Lipstadt only scraped the carapace of his technique, but the
accusation that he perverted the sources was enough to provoke him to legal
action. This, in turn, led Lipstadt's supporters to fund a small army of
researchers, led by a Cambridge historian, Prof Richard Evans, who for the
first time subjected his oeuvre to minute examination. The results were
devastating.
The expert reports for the trial, by Profs Christopher Browning, Robert Jan
van Pelt, Richard Evans and Dr Peter Longerich, showed he systematically
misrepresented documents in order to exculpate Hitler of anti-Jewish crimes
and minimise the destruction wreaked on Europe's Jews.
They demonstrated that he ignored evidence that the mass murder of Jews by
the Nazis was a systematic campaign of genocide, that Hitler knew about it,
and that it culminated in the slaughter of millions of Jews in gas chambers
at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This was not a matter of interpretation, a legitimate activity for
historians. Irving could only reach his conclusions by wilful
misinterpretation. For example, he claimed Hitler was innocent of the
November 1938 pogrom called Kristallnacht and that, when he found out about
it, he tried to limit the destruction of Jewish property.
In support of this claim, Irving cited a telex by the head of the German
police which, he claimed, ordered his men to prevent damage to Jewish
property. But Irving neglected to mention that the property in question was
only business premises: not synagogues or private dwellings. Nor did Hitler
issue instructions to prevent Jews from being mistreated or killed.
In another instance, he mistranslated a telegram from Hitler's headquarters
in November 1941 requiring that a transport of Jews from Berlin to the East
should not be liquidated as meaning that no transports of Jews should suffer
this fate. In fact, it clearly referred to one transport of Jews from Berlin
whom Hitler wanted to spare from the general massacre so they could serve as
hostages.
But is this mere quibbling over what happened in the distant past? Another
expert witness, Prof Hajo Funke, a German political scientist, explained
that Irving's rewriting of the past was music to the ears of the far right
in Germany. For neo-Nazis desperate to break the association between
Hitlerism and horror, Irving's benign portrait of the Fuhrer and denial of
the Holocaust was a step towards political rehabilitation. Indeed, the trial
showed that Irving was a welcome speaker on far-right platforms all over the
world.
Its outcome is unlikely to shake the faith of these true believers. If
anything, it will confirm their paranoid fantasies about Jewish power.
Irving will become the latest martyr to the world Jewish conspiracy, to
which he referred throughout the trial as the cause of his problems. Does
this mean it was a waste of time, energy and money?
Critics of the process may depict it as a pyrrhic victory, since the trial
gave Irving global coverage. They may say it offended against notions of
free speech and could provoke a backlash in his favour.
Yet for the public, the trial has destroyed Irving's reputation as a writer
who needs to be taken seriously. It has exposed him as a liar with no
genuine interest in the pursuit of truth. The trial was not about freedom of
speech: it was about freedom for falsehood. History was not in question, but
the so-called historian was.
By unmasking the methods of the deniers, the trial has actually made space
for legitimate research and debate about the history of the Nazi era. It has
shown the politicians of the far right that they will never be able to rely
on true scholarship to erase the crimes of the Third Reich. The world is a
little bit safer for truth and democracy.
David Cesarani is professor of modern Jewish history at Southampton
University and director of the Wiener Library, London
Copyright 2000 The Irish Times The Irish Times
April 12, 2000
Judge finds Irving a 'Holocaust denier' and anti-Semitic Defeat of
revisionist historian described as 'epic victory for truth and justice'
By RACHEL DONNELLY
The five-year battle by the revisionist historian, Mr David Irving, to
salvage his professional and personal reputation ended in humiliating defeat
and possible financial ruin yesterday when a judge in the High Court in
London rejected his libel action and condemned him as an "active Holocaust
denier, anti-Semitic and a racist".
The judgment casts serious doubt on whether Mr Irving (62) will be able to
resume his career with any credibility, condemning him as an academic who
"fell far short of the standard to be expected of a conscientious historian"
in his treatment of historical evidence.
The result, delivered in the tense atmosphere of court 36, was a highly
charged finale to a six-week libel action brought by the historian against
the US academic, Prof Deborah Lipstadt, and her publisher, Penguin Books UK,
who pleaded justification. It ended Mr Irving's battle to clear his name
after Prof Lipstadt's 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault
on Truth and Memory, branded the author of Hitler's War a Holocaust denier,
who deliberately misrepresented historical evidence to diminish Hitler's
role in the Holocaust. Mr Irving also cast doubt upon the existence of gas
chambers at Auschwitz designed for the systematic murder of Jews and also
the broadly accepted historical fact that millions of Jews died during the
second World War.
Mr Irving was denied leave to appeal in the High Court but he will lodge an
appeal with the Court of Appeal. He faces a bill for costs of up to (pounds)
2 million sterling. After the verdict Mr Irving spoke to reporters at his
London home and said he felt "tired, very tired. I would describe the
judgment in two words - firstly, indescribable, and secondly, perverse."
As more than 200 journalists and observers sat in the cramped courtroom, Mr
Justice Gray spent almost two hours reading a summary of his 300-page
judgment, concluding that Mr Irving was a Holocaust denier and that he
associated with right-wing extremists.
Sitting at the front of the court, at times with his head bowed, Mr Irving
heard Mr Justice Gray condemn him in the most unequivocal language. It was
the first time an English court had heard a case relating to Holocaust
denial, and Mr Justice Gray said it appeared to him "incontrovertible" that
Mr Irving qualified as a Holocaust denier. Furthermore, he was anti-Semitic
and often used "hostile, critical, offensive" language to describe Jews.
Mr Irving had argued that there was no basis for Prof Lipstadt's claim that
he falsified historical documents and statistics in his published works and
in public statements to serve his ideological agenda. But the role of the
judge in the case, Mr Justice Gray said, was not to make findings about what
happened during the Nazi regime but to consider Mr Irving's treatment of the
available historical evidence.
With that role in mind, Mr Justice Gray held that while Mr Irving was a
military historian whose knowledge of the second World War was unparalleled,
the 19 examples that the defendants had relied on in court to demonstrate
his distortion of evidence, racism and anti-Semitism "are almost invariably
well founded". The only positive element in the ruling for Mr Irving came
when the judge accepted the defendants had not proved defamatory charges
made against him. Mr Irving was accused of putting extracts from the
Goebbels diaries that he had obtained from a Moscow archive at risk, hanging
a self-portrait by Hitler above his desk and of planning to speak at an
anti-Zionist conference in Sweden. However, Mr Justice Gray held that the
failure to prove the truth of the charges did not have any material effect
on Mr Irving's reputation.
As Mr Irving sped away from the court, avoiding protesters who had earlier
thrown an egg at him, Prof Lipstadt was jubilant in victory. "I feel
exceptionally vindicated in what has been five years of excruciating effort
on my part," she said. She also accused Mr Irving of being "evil" and of
"dancing on the graves" of victims of the Holocaust.
The Israeli ambassador to Britain, Mr Dror Zeigerman, who was in court to
hear the verdict, said the result was an important marker in the struggle
against anti-Semitism and racism. Lord Janner of Braunstone QC, who is
chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, described the verdict as "an
epic victory for truth and justice".
Copyright 2000 PR Newswire Europe Limited Press Association Newsfile
April 12, 2000, Wednesday 03:31 AM Eastern Time
I'M GETTING SUPPORT, SAYS LIBEL CASE HISTORIAN
Danny Kemp, PA News
Historian David Irving told today how he had received hundreds of supportive
e-mails since a humiliating High Court libel defeat in which he was branded
a racist.
"Over the last 24 hours or so since the judgment came out I have had 322
e-mails from all over the world - I was up to 4am reading through them -
from people who have read my books and saying 'What on earth is going on
here, Mr Irving?"'
The support came after his libel action against Professor Deborah Lipstadt
and Penguin books ended in the judge calling him an anti-semite, leaving him
facing financial ruin, Mr Irving, 62, told BBC1 Breakfast News.
But Professor Lipstadt told the same programme: "Whatever David Irving says
- I listened to him for 32 days in court and have read his books - and the
judge said this too, you have to treat whatever he says with a tremendous
grain of salt and a tremendous question mark.
"So I am not so worried about how many 'hits' he says he has got."
==
Copyright 2000 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
Daily Mail (London), April 12, 2000, p. 6
"A Brilliant Historian Ruined by a Fatal Flaw," by Tom Bower
DAVID IRVING'S self-destruction over the past 20 years has been a
bizarre spectacle.
Fatally flawed by his obsession about Adolf Hitler's genius, Irving has
propelled himself on to a downward spiral, degenerating from an
internationally acclaimed historian into the reviled propagandist who
denied the Holocaust.
Irving's masterpiece, Hitler's War, published in 1977, was a landmark,
challenging the essence of researching and writing the history of the
Third Reich.
>From the opening of the 926-page book describing Hitler leaving the
'elegant marbled halls' of his headquarters in Berlin on September 3,
1939 to step into 'Amerika', his special train 'parked in a dusty
Pomeranian railroad station' to direct the beginning of the Second World
War Irving revolutionised the historian's craft.
Countless readers became enraptured by his original interpretation of
the war, told for the first time through Hitler's eyes, and by his
gripping narrative style.
Instead of caricaturing German politicians and soldiers as stupid and
brutal sausageeating Huns, Irving humanised the Nazi leaders, describing
their undoubted skills and intelligence.
For some of the Nazis' victims, Irving's style and crusade was
offensive.
But for those seeking an alternative interpretation of history, Irving's
approach was refreshing.
For 30 years, Britons had read flawed histories of the war which glossed
over the errors perpetrated by the Allies. Irving, it appeared, was
offering new insights which apparently were also factually accurate. His
sources appeared to be impeccable.
Irving's research was, at the time, revolutionary among historians.
Instead of relying upon the official records of the British and American
governments, Irving had crisscrossed Germany and Austria to meet unique
eyewitnesses, their widows and their heirs who could shed a new light on
key events.
Unlike the historians who offered a dry recital of facts gleaned from
archives, Irving met former Nazi officials, loyal secretaries, adjutants
and grieving widows who were either eyewitnesses of critical meetings
and conversations between Hitler, his generals and his ministers, or
possessed unpublished diaries and records which had never reached the
German archives.
SPEAKING fluent German and clearly eager to give another interpretation
of history, Irving acquired information which overturned the established
version of Nazi history as written by British historians.
With researchers and translators, Irving spent weeks in Germany's
archives, finding Nazi documents and files which even German historians
had not bothered to read.
Over the years, Irving's own archive, weighing nearly half a ton, became
a source of information for young historians. But gradually, most
visitors to his Mayfair home began to recognise his fatal flaw.
The unprecedented enormity of events and extraordinary personalities who
inhabited the Third Reich mesmerises many of those who have immersed
themselves in the astonishing detail about the secrets and lies of that
extraordinary regime.
In that sense, Irving was no different from countless intelligent men
and women across the world whose lives are still dominated by sifting
through the irreconcilable intrigues and human disasters of the Third
Reich. But Irving was exceptional in one vital aspect.
Irving had spent so much time with the widows of Nazi murderers and
Wehrmacht generals, with Hitler's secretaries and, most importantly,
with a huge cast list of the surviving luminaries of Hitler's regime,
that he had adopted their self-interested and false interpretation of
history.
Reading through the extraordinary list of those surviving Nazi leaders
who entertained Irving with coffee and cakes while offering their
self-justification, it is possible to understand how he became beguiled
by their civilised behaviour and refined intelligence.
But others have also sat with Nazis, listened to their stories and
retained sufficient objectivity to sift through their lies and extract
the gems of truth. Irving found that task not only impossible but
unwelcome.
He not only sympathised with his host's prejudices, but he was even
willing to distort information to enhance their case. And he went one
fatal step further. He took advantage of the ignorance of British
historians who could neither read German nor had visited his prime
sources, and falsified history.
His dishonesty was first exposed during the Seventies in his first book
describing the bombing of Dresden and later in his unsuccessful libel
trial about his book describing the destruction of PQ17, a wartime
convoy carrying supplies from Britain to Russia. In both books, Irving
had described the British as cowards and even criminals.
In his 1977 biography of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, The Trail of the
Fox, the German was glamorised as a dashing hero against the dull-witted
Montgomery. His adoration of everything German took an irreversible
twist with his next book, Hitler's War.
Quite correctly, Irving pointed out that not one among the millions of
surviving Nazi documents directly incriminated Hitler with the Final
Solution. In Irving's mind, that irrefutable discovery excused Hitler
from any knowledge of the Holocaust.
THOSE distortions were contaminated by Irving's developing
anti-Semitism.
Outraged by the fierce criticism of Hitler's War, especially from Jews,
Irving became obsessed and unbalanced by hatred of those critics.
He turned against his critics and declared war on them. In a ludicrously
flawed biography of Josef Goebbels, the brilliant minister for
propaganda, Irving wil-fully distorted the position of Jews in Germany
and blamed their persecution on Goebbels.
In retrospect, it is clear Irving was never a reasoned historian.
His falsification of history and his obsession with 'denying' the
Holocaust was motivated by an uncontrollable hero-worship of Hitler.
Compared to most people's heroes, Irving chose a monster whom he sought
to rehabilitate by distortion.
Yesterday, his perversion was exposed but in his Mayfair home, that will
be merely shrugged off as a setback. And in years to come, his books
will still be enjoyed as gripping yarns although hopefully no one will
believe his fantasies.
Tom Bower is the author of Blind Eye to Murder, the allied failure to
de-Nazify Germany (Little Brown, GBP 6.99)
==
Copyright 2000 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
Daily Mail (London), April 12, 2000, p. 6
"GBP 2m: Irving's Final Reckoning," by David Williams
HISTORIAN David Irving faces a GBP 2million legal bill after a judge
yesterday branded him a Holocaust denier, a racist and an anti-Semite.
In a damning ruling, Mr Justice Gray said the 62-year-old author had
portrayed Hitler 'in an unwarrantedly favourable light, principally in
relation to his attitude towards and responsibility for the treatment of
the Jews'.
He described Irving as an associate of neo-Nazis and accused him of
'persistently and deliberately misrepresenting and manipulating
historical evidence' for his own ideological reasons.
The High Court ruling was greeted by Jewish groups. Lord Janner,
chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: 'It is an epic
victory for truth and justice.' Irving, however, condemned it as
'indescribable, perverse' and said some of the judge's findings were
'historically incredible'.
The military historian had sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt and
publishers Penguin for libel over her 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust:
The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, claiming it destroyed his
livelihood and generated waves of hatred against him.
But, yesterday, he sat red-faced and shirt- sleeved, staring at the desk
in front of him, as the judge said he found that Irving 'is an active
Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he
associates with Rightwing extremists who promote neo-Nazism'.
Examples of that anti-Semitism included claims that the Jews deserve to
be disliked and brought the Holocaust on themselves; that Jews generate
anti-Semitism by greed and mendacity; and that they are among the scum
of humanity.
The judge went on: 'A ditty composed by Irving for his daughter is
undeniably racist in putting into her mouth the words "I am a baby Aryan
. . . I have no plans to marry an ape or Rastafarian".
'Similarly, Irving's reference to "one of them" reading the television
news strikes me as evidence of racism of a more insidious kind.
The same applies to Irving's proclaimed queasiness on seeing black men
playing cricket for England.' A downcast Irving, who was hit on the head
by an egg thrown by chanting demonstrators outside the court, arrived
from his Mayfair flat one minute before the judge came into the packed
courtroom.
After the verdict he said he intended to appeal after he was told he
would be liable for most of the costs of the 32- day case. In contrast,
Professor Lipstadt, hugged and kissed supporters. She said she never
doubted she would be vindicated, adding: 'I hope this victory will save
other authors from having to face such trials and tribulations.
'I see this not only as a personal victory but also a victory for all
those who speak out against hate and prejudice. It was a struggle for
truth and for memory and a fight against those who sow the seeds of
racism and anti-Semitism.' The judge said Irving was beyond question
able and intelligent. His mastery of the detail of historical documents
was 'remarkable'and his knowledge of World War II 'unparalleled'. But
the case involved the manner in which he had written about Hitler's
attitude towards the Jews and his responsibility for their fate under
the Nazis.
Irving, who represented himself and brought the action with the help of
400 supporters worldwide, claims he is now facing financial ruin. He
denied the book's claim that he distorted statistics and documents to
serve his own ideological purposes and reach untenable conclusions. He
had never claimed the Holocaust did not occur, he said, but did question
the number of Jewish dead and denied their systematic extermination in
concentration camp gas chambers.
He argued that the killing of millions was logistically impossible and
dismissed eyewitness accounts of gassings as lies. There were gassings
on a limited scale at Auschwitz, he said, but he claimed a gas chamber
at the centre of the case was used only to fumigate 'objects and
cadavers' of typhus lice or as an air-raid shelter.
The publishers and Professor Lipstadt, 53, holder of the Dorot chair in
Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta,
Georgia, denied libel and pleaded justification. Their QC Richard
Rampton said Irving was a 'Rightwing extremist, a racist and, in
particular, a rabid anti-Semite' who had prostituted his reputation as a
serious historian in his obsessive desire to exonerate Hitler.
He argued that a convergence of testimony made it a 'moral certainty'
the Holocaust killed five or six million Jews, gipsies and others
between 1941 and 1944. Reliable estimates said 1.1million were gassed at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The Holocaust was orchestrated by Heinrich Himmler, an intimate
associate of Hitler, and it was 'inconceivable' it was without Hitler's
knowledge and authority.
The case, characterised by bitter exchanges, was the first time
Holocaust denial had been considered by a British court.
Eldred Tabachnik, QC, president of the Board of Deputies of British
Jews, said after the verdict: 'It proves Irving is a falsifier of
history.' Kevin Bays of solicitors Davenport Lyons, which represented
Penguin Books, said: 'The case shows the importance of educating young
people in the Holocaust, especially as a symbol of the dangers of
allowing racist dictatorships to rule.'
d.williams@dailymail.co.uk
==
Copyright 2000 Associated Newspapers Ltd.
Daily Mail (London), April 12, 2000, p. 7
"A Broken Marriage and Three Lost Daughters, the Awful Price of
Obsession," by Geoffrey Levy
FOR years David Irving has been telling a story about Hitler's
right-hand man, Heinrich Himmler, watching a mass execution, and how a
woman held out her baby.
Himmler, in his own papers, recorded: 'I am a parent myself and I
involuntarily stepped forward to take the child, but at that moment the
shots rang out.' Himmler found himself with bits of brain on the hem of
his leather greatcoat.
Why does Irving repeat this grotesque little scene about the second most
powerful man in the Third Reich, who organised the East European death
camps where millions perished? Because Himmler allegedly holding out his
hands testifies to the 'humanity' of the Nazis.
Yesterday's condemnation of Irving by Mr Justice Gray will make little
if any difference. You can be sure that Irving will be repeating this
little anecdote again before long.
For more than 40 years, ever since he spent a year working in a steel
mill in the Ruhr to improve his German and fell in love with the
country, the British naval officer's son has been on a revisionist
mission to prove to the world that Hitler and the Nazis were not quite
the monsters that history says they were.
The question is: Why has Irving done it? Born in Essex, his own family
has a proud military tradition.
His late father John fought in the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and in the
Arctic convoy battles of the Second World War as a Commander. His eldest
brother, also John, was a senior RAF officer.
Brother John, 69, a postwar Group Captain who served in the RAF for 23
years, is the holder of an MBE and is a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical
Society. A chartered engineer with a PhD, he is these days an inventor
and Wiltshire county councillor.
Yesterday he offered this single terse comment on his brother's views of
Hitler: 'I refer you to Genesis, Chapter IV, verse 9.' Verse 9 says:
'Then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is Abel your brother?" And he said,
"I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?" ' Family estrangement is
nothing new to Irving. He barely sees the three surviving daughters of
his first marriage, which was dissolved.
One of them, Paloma, 33, who works for an advertising company, did not
invite him to her wedding.
'I'm completely opposed to his beliefs,' she said. 'In terms of women,
what he says is a joke.' What Irving says is that women are 'mental
chewing gum' created for decoration or childbearing.
Another daughter, Pilar, 34, an artist who lives in Madrid, said: 'My
views and my family's views are totally opposed to his, and anyone who
reads what he says must find them totally laughable.' His third
daughter, Beatrice, refused to give him her London address after
returning from Australia. 'I don't agree with his opinions and I don't
even want to be asked about them,' she said. A fourth, Josephine, who
had a history of depression, threw herself from a window last year.
Irving's flat is filled with Nazi memorabilia, as well as a
self-portrait of Hitler and a small statue of the Fuhrer which he
describes as 'rather sweet'.
He lives with Bente, 37, the daughter of a Danish dentist, and their
daughter Jessica, six.
His attraction for her, she says, is that he is 'different . . . I like
people who are different, a little eccentric'.
She does not subscribe to her lover's views but loyally declares: 'It
would have been easy for him to give up his beliefs, to stop writing and
speaking out, but he hasn't. I respect him for that.' How different
Irving's life might have been if he had never gone to Germany as a young
man. He might, like his brother John, have been a boffin, having won a
sciences ICI scholarship from his minor public school to Imperial
College, London.
He was one of four children, born the youngest of twins. The elder twin,
Nicholas, a civil servant, lives alone in a rather rundown council block
in Holborn, Central London.
There is also a sister, Jennifer.
According to Irving, their father, the sailor who served in two wars,
abandoned the family when he was very young, leaving their mother,
Beryl, an artist, to bring up the children alone.
During the war they lived close enough to the bombing for Irving to
remember the V1s, but he says it wasn't until he went to Germany that he
learned of Dresden and its firestorms.
Irving and his Spanish ex-wife, Pilar, divorced in the early Eighties
after two decades of marriage, and she lives in West London. 'Some of
the things he said you cannot believe I couldn't believe them for 20
years,' she has said.
Some people saw a lonely bitterness about Irving's eyes long before the
publishing world sent him to Coventry, a sourness with his lot which
belies the almost boyish pleasure he seems to take, even in defeat, from
being at the centre of a global argument. If bitterness is at the heart
of his writings, what could have caused it? In the eyes of most other
men, he has everything.
Tall and distinguished, he had a good education and has a fine brain.
Women were never a problem.
An absentee father? Perhaps, but those were war years when most
children's fathers were absent too although for very different reasons.
A realisation that he would never be as bright as his brother, John, the
PhD? This is warmer water, especially as after Imperial College he tried
to enlist in the RAF but failed his medical. That was when he went to
the Ruhr, and fell in love with Germany.
But it was not the modernising Germany of then Chancellor Konrad
Adenauer but the brutal Third Reich that became his spiritual homeland.
And yet, certain seeds appear to have been sown much earlier when he won
a school prize, he chose Hitler's Mein Kampf. He says he wasn't
interested in it but simply wanted to shock.
The tragedy is that he could have been a brilliant historian. He chose
instead to do what he did as a boy to shock.
Reading Hitler is one thing. Revising him is something else. But in
Irving's final defeat, let us be as charitable to him as he has been to
Hitler, and say he simply made an error of judgment.
g.levy@dailymail.co.uk
===

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